"To travel apd better thing Lo than to arri GF Some of us must always contemplate the possibilities of getting off for an annual holiday'
pith "a "minimum amount Bt luggage Ina really efficient way. 'We play with this iden each year with irritating regularity and never' "Beem to steened in the attempt. 1 Have about decided that some people ate born to travel lightly and others Just as some people are born have tidy desks and shelves and others to live amid the clutter of material possessions in tumultuous disarray, This is the packing season and despite the knowledge that we have] Ssgone through the identical act on numerable yest occasions there is always a happy freshness about the idea of assembling the material ey: dences of ourselves in trunks and bags and boxes. We toy with the} dea of taking only and exactly what} need for a month away from Theme, as though it was the first} time in our life that the problem' had ever confronted us, and we end up by carrying three times the amount of possessions required for the sighted-for holiday.
must travel lightly this time; we say to ourselves, comment is het whether the traveller is going to Weihaiwei or around the world, and thi 88. is attached to] the idea, We start to clear out] drawers sand cupboards. Lost in admiration at our half empty shelves which always appear more Indy-ike and neat in their somi-dismant-Jed state then they ever did when full, we continue the dismantling, Admiration yields to dismay only when we begin to realize that the dismantled articles must all tucked away somehow in our pre: scribed space of luggage. We and up by calling into service an additional piece—that is unless we belong to that superior bread of human packers who really travel lightly. cee is reason enough for a With most of us the mere process
after we have completed 'i process. It is mental as ell ar
comes in shor Physical labour. Only thoro who have struggled with closing an overflowing suit-case until their breath
ger-nails have quick while beads of ration stand out on their brows can fully: realize the truth of this.
The mental Labour comes in through the anxiety which we face trying to remember everything we wanted to take, and yet at the Sqane time to travel lightly. This is on the face of it a paradox. Moreover we know—some of us—that tons of anxiety could be used up and pounds of concentration and yet at the end of the journey our most cherished and important possession of the holiday will likely have been left behind.
Though you know that you should take only "best," small in-Idecisions of "packing always lurk in the hope that through some kind dispensation of Providence, "Second-best," will take on new and glamorous qualities once removed from So in goes "second-best" in the spirit of compromise and the feeling of surprise fs perennially new to find "that if anything,. looks shabbier lying across a strange bed in a holiday setting.
Accessories, which in a present day constitute almost as much bulk. as necessities, have an unseemly way of getting out-of-hand when packed. Even the most successful kers have been known to go through an entire ocean voyage wearing a frock sans its qualifying girdle, simply because the mischiefous girdle failed to come to light. amid the dark recesses of luggage.
This might be used as an argument against carrying accessories which undoubtedly do take up as much room as the major articles, but there again comes in the argument that some of us have certain congenital defects of character which Keep us from final realization of travelling lightly.
Not to be surrounded by bottles, oat-hangers, shoe-trees, small pil: lows boot-blacking and countless odds and ends of unrelated things is for some of us a temperamental impossibility.
Yet, I have discovered, as doubtless many others must have done by. now, that next to having been born light packer comes the ability to view with amusement one's pecu-Varities. If you cannot travel lightly you can at least travel with sense of humour. This permits you to see your holiday in proportion to its own flecting joys and not in proportion to the discomforts of attaining those joys. In this repect, T believe, packing takes a place' with matrimony and many other human experiences which, without a sense of humour, would have been discarded as too difficult of achievement long ago.
To learn: through disillusionment how to laugh at the things left behind is the better part of travelling.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.