The movie Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, is the story of Ryan Bingham, an employee terminator for downsizing companies, who also has a side career as a motivational speaker.
Bingham interweaves challenges to his audience with advice to the people he fires. In his motivational talks, he sets up an empty backpack as a focus point.
He associates the backpack with the burdens we carry through our lives and challenges his listeners to consider what is in their backpacks, and how as we travel through life we become bogged down by our ‘stuff’ and by our commitments to people.
Bingham preaches to his audience, How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks; then you start adding larger stuff; clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack.
Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets; your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack. Feel the weight of that bag.
Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life; all those negotiations and arguments and secrets; the compromises.
As we watch this scene, we start to think about what we are carrying around, our burdens and our connections to different parts of our life. A friend of mine described each burden as a golden thread, securing us more firmly in the cage of our life.
Bingham points out that it is with our backpacks that we journey through life. For most of us, our backpacks are pretty heavy. Can we enjoy our journey with all that weight on our backs?
What’s in your backpack?
The weight
Can you feel how heavy the backpack is? We weigh ourselves down to the point where we can’t move. Bingham says, “Your relationships are the heaviest components of your life.”
Bingham preaches we can choose not to be weighed down with objects. In truth, we all accumulate lots of currently useless items over time. They are the items that once had value to us but no longer.
He also advocates the letting go of pesky personal relationships, praising the avoidance of commitments and connections.
We must remember that this advice comes from a man whose entire wardrobe is contained in his airline carry-on bag, has no friends or intimate relationships, and whose lifestyle has made him a stranger to his family.
His backpack is as empty as his life.
The Moving Journey:
Bingham also advocates continuous moving through life. He considers he is at home in airports and on flights. Experiences are more important than objects. Moving is living.
The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake; moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.
He thinks of himself as a shark, but not in the competitive sense. Sharks never stop or sleep. Sharks have no relationships; they die if they stop swimming.
In Bingham’s mind, relationships slow you down or hold you back. He has none in his backpack. He has even become a stranger to his family, being always on the move, no longer a part of his family. As his older sister suggests when she asks him for a favor, I know you have a problem with doing things for people.
His journey involves a quest to achieve ten million frequent flyer miles on the airline he uses exclusively for his travel. He will be only the seventh passenger to achieve this, and the youngest. For flying coast to coast more than 3,000 times, he will have his name written on the side of an airplane. [This guy has issues]
Connections
Bingham is a man who spends his life making connections – between planes. He also spends his work time severing connections – for others. He fires people in corporate downsizing. In his words, we set them adrift when they are most vulnerable.
His cost is to avoid making any people connections for himself. He doesn’t know how to connect with people or even if he wants to.
His older sister observes, You’re awfully isolated, the way you live. Walking through a crowd, Bingham returns with, Isolated? I’m surrounded. She further points out that he lives in a cocoon of self-banishment with no human connection.
But connections find him. At his younger sister’s wedding, her groom, Jim gets cold feet and Bingham is pushed forward to handle it.
Jim tells Bingham that the night before, he couldn’t sleep. He started to think about his future – wedding, buying a house, mortgage, having kids, paying college tuition, having grandkids, and eventually, death. Jim is mentally packing his backpack and reeling from the perceived weight of the staggering baggage.
“What’s the point?” he asks.
Bingham is caught in a connection where he must preach the exact opposite of what his base philosophy is.
He admits that what Jim say is all true. There is no point. But if you think about your favorite moments, your most important moments in life, you were never alone. Life’s better with company. Everybody needs a co-pilot.
Wakeup call
The wedding and his intervention wake up feelings in Bingham that perhaps he would enjoy his moving journey more with his own co-pilot. After years of carrying his own empty backpack, he thinks maybe he wants to put something back in. He seeks out his casual intimate fellow traveler and finds she has a family of her own.
Where he considered her only a distraction, she considered him the same. He finds it’s tough looking in a mirror, having yourself look back, and disliking what you see.
After years of telling the people he terminates that the firing is a wakeup call for them, Bingham receives his own wakeup call.
Do we need a wakeup call?
Repack
From his book, What’s In Your Backpack? John Bytheway recalls the pack one of his fellow Scouts that he lugged up a steep trail. “He had things in his pack that were too heavy, that he didn’t need, that weighed him down, and that made the hike a lot harder than it needed to be.”
What does this all teach us?
We don’t have to be like Bingham, with only three shirts and no connections in his backpack. However, periodic examination of our backpacks and our lives will certainly reveal unnecessary former treasures we can put aside and relationships that are holding us back from what will make us truly happy.
Perhaps we are carrying bad habits, procrastination, a poor self-image, guilt, unresolved feelings and hindering relationships. We could replace them with a capacity to love, energy, courage to follow our own path and supporting relationships that inspire us to move ahead with purpose. Perhaps it is as simple as emptying a garage stuffed with former treasures.
After we purge those heavy burdens and change some of those relationships, we can pick up our backpack and it will feel just right.
What’s in your backpack?
Command a vital life. Live free.
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