We all have our issues. We had trauma from childhood. We have bad habits we picked up in college. We have scripts we learned, patterns we’ve repeated, coping mechanisms we’ve developed.

We prefer not to die with them, to carry them always. But when exactly are we planning on dealing with them? In a perfect world, we would have gotten serious about it before we had kids. In the next best world, we’d deal with them now.

“All I know is that as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier,” Bruce Springsteen explains in his spectacular autobiography Born To Run, “…much heavier.” We talked before about his strange and disorienting childhood, which was warped by the grief of his grandparents and their inclination to spoil him, along with the distance and demons of his father. He related that, like a lot of us, “the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness…” When the bill comes due, Springsteen says, the payment is in tears.

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