The Cost of Avoidance

I recently realised I hadn't booked hold luggage for my flight home, just cabin luggage and a small backpack. My mind went into overdrive, trying to find the perfect combination of packing tricks to avoid paying for hold luggage at the gate. I could feel the urgency rise—a kind of frantic energy trying to avoid some imagined consequence.

But still, something deeper stirred. A quiet resistance. A tensing. A voice whispering: How did I not see this? How could I be so careless? This would be so wasteful. I could use that money for something useful.

It wasn’t about logistics. It was about shame. That soft, contracting sense of having done something wrong, of being foolish, of somehow lacking. And beneath that: scarcity. The fear of not having enough, of needing to be extremely careful in order to be safe.

What struck me most was this: even if I had a million euros, that sensation would likely still arise. That voice would still echo the same message. The discomfort wasn’t coming from my bank account. It was coming from the conditioned reflex to avoid discomfort itself.

I watched as my mind scrambled to solve it — not to solve the luggage issue, really, but to solve the feeling. It looked for someone to blame (me), it tried to rationalise, it reviewed the past and imagined other ways this could’ve gone differently. All in service of avoiding the sensation of discomfort. But here’s the thing:

The discomfort is not a problem.

The sensation is not a threat.

Nothing needs to be fixed.

When I just sat with it, it passed. Or rather, it softened. The pressure eased. I could see it all more clearly—not as a crisis, not as failure, but just as a moment of human vulnerability arising and dissolving.

It’s not really about whether I end up paying extra at the gate. That’s just the surface. What matters is this growing capacity to meet each moment (even the small, seemingly silly ones) with clarity, tenderness, and space.

And that’s the real freedom: not in getting it all right, but in no longer needing to.