No Luggage Required
On creativity, wet gardens, and what a pop song from 1988 taught me about living.
This morning I woke up with a song in my head.
Not a song I chose. One that arrived, the way things sometimes do, from somewhere I wasn’t looking. Vuela Vuela, by Magneto. A Mexican pop song from the late 80s that my brother loved when he was a child.
I lay there singing it to myself. Then I looked up the lyrics.
No te hace falta equipaje.
You don’t need luggage. What does that mean?
The garden was wet, rain forecast, and pretty cold. I had a plan for working in the garden. The plan required dry ground, specific tools, and a particular sequence.
None of that was available that morning.
I looked around at what was actually there, what I was actually capable of, what felt genuinely useful in that moment. And I did it.
Nothing collapsed in the garden, even though I didn’t get close to it.
I’ve been reading a lot of articles and notes about becoming. About systems for growth, frameworks for transformation, and protocols for reaching your potential.
There is something underneath all of it that bothers me, and it took me a while to name it.
These ideas share a hidden assumption: that the present self is insufficient. That there is a future self, optimized, complete, arrived, who will finally be the real one. And that the distance between here and there is a problem to be solved.
“You have to move from here to there,” as here is bad, and there is great!
I understand the appeal. I’ve felt it myself. I sometimes write “trying to help others.”
But I’ve started to notice what it costs.
When every action is conditional on an expected result, you are never quite where you are. You are always slightly ahead of yourself, measuring the gap, calculating the return. The present moment becomes a means to an end. And ends, by definition, are always elsewhere.
In a system, there are preconditions. Creativity uses what is available now.
Last spring, the thought appeared: my tools are unprotected from the rain that comes every year. It arrived the way the song arrived this morning— unbidden, available, present. And from that thought, I could choose. I could build a shed from a sense of curiosity, from care, from the quiet pleasure of making something that solves a real problem.
Or I could build it from anxiety, from the nagging sense of something undone, from the fear of being unprepared. Or even the feeling that I do not have something I should.
Same shed. Completely different interior weather.
The shed gets built either way. But only one version of the builder is free.
My uncle bought an Atari computer when I was young.
He didn’t know what he was giving me. He wasn’t executing a plan for my development. He was simply a man who found something interesting and wanted to share it. That curiosity — unattached to any outcome — became the pattern that shaped my entire career.
He didn’t leave me a thing. He left me a way of seeing. I decided to make it part of myself.
And this morning, decades later, my brother’s three-year-old enthusiasm for a pop song floated up through time and landed in my waking mind, carrying the exact message I needed.
Volando encontrarás un mundo nuevo. Solo déjate llevar.
Flying, you will find a new world. Just let yourself be carried.
Imagination.
I’m not suggesting we do nothing. I’m not suggesting we drift.
I’m suggesting that imagination — real imagination, the kind that moves freely, the kind a child has before the world tells them what’s realistic — is different from planning.
Planning asks: what do I need to do to get where I want to go?
Imagination asks: what is here, what am I, and what becomes possible when they meet?
One of those questions closes things down. The other opens them.
There’s a passage I keep returning to, from a very old book:
He helps people lose everything they know, everything they desire, and creates confusion in those who think that they know.
Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.
I used to find this confusing. It sounded like an invitation to surrender. Isn’t knowledge the way to a better life?
Now it sounds like the most practical advice I’ve ever read. Thoughts, systems, and attachment to future outcomes have a different quality than creativity, unconditioned, innocent, and based on reality.
What am I available for today?
Not:
What should I accomplish? What does my system require? How does this action serve my future self?
Just:
What is here, what do I have, what feels alive and useful and aligned with the life I actually want to live?
The answer changes every day. Some days it’s the garden. Some days it’s the shed. Some days it’s a song that arrived without asking, carrying a message from a three-year-old who became your brother, who became part of the pattern that became you.
No luggage required.
love,
Jose
I started off with an Atari that my Dad bought me. I was lucky I had a cool Dad. Started programming and the rest, as they say is history.
Namaste
Is this what freewill is?