Burden’s on the Path

As I walk along my path today I am getting very weak and tired. I am carrying far too much luggage and not all of it is my own. I know I have had this problem for a while, and every time I think I have dealt with it and set down some luggage, I always end up picking up more just down the road a bit.

 It is an age old problem and I know I am not the first nor will I be the last to struggle with it.  This burden is not my own, but yet I take it on as if it is. A lesson I keep trying to learn is that I am only responsible for myself; we all are (with the exception of parents with young children).

 Taking responsibility for others and carrying their luggage for them, stunts their own personal growth and keeps them from building up their own strength so that they can easily carry their own baggage. It is a simple thing to realize this, to understand it, but it is much more difficult to break the habit.

I see a large log ahead and decide to take a rest and this time as I do, I unload all of this baggage onto the ground. Usually when I stop to rest I leave it all on thinking it would be too much work to load myself back up, but this time I will not be picking it all back up. As I sit here now without the baggage I have carried so long, I realize how amazing it feels to be without it.

So much of my journey down this path has been prolonged because of the weight I have been carrying. And so many times I have had to stop to pick up more, re-arrange them and tend to them instead of making the progress in my journey that I should have been.

One of the hardest things to accept is that I alone am to blame. These people did not ask me to carry their bags, I volunteered, I did this to myself. The next logical question is why? Why would I do such a thing, taking on so much that it slows my own journey when most of the people did not even ask for my help?

In my heart I want to answer that I did it out of the kindness of my heart because I want to help others even if it means sacrificing my own progress, but this cannot be true. If it were the truth then why do I continue to struggle with walking burden free when I know it is what is best for those whose luggage I want to carry?

The answer I have found is not an easy one for me to admit, and this leads me to believe it must be the truth. When I take on the burden for others and make them my responsibility I am putting myself in a position of power at the center of their universe. It is an egotistical power play in which I make myself more important in their universe than I should be, for now I have their luggage and if they need it or any of its contents they must come to me. I am in fact making them unhealthy, for I have always said it is unhealthy to feel as if you NEED someone else, yet I am forcing them to need me.  I am again making myself my own worst enemy.

This realization makes me a bit melancholy for perhaps I am not quiet the pure hearted person I thought I was, but yet it also gives me hope. Now that I have discovered the true source and realized how it goes against my own logic and morals perhaps I can successfully change my ways and begin to make more progress on my own path while at the same time truly helping those that I was fooled myself into believing I was helping all along.