Who Packs the Bag

The holiday begins much earlier than the holiday.

It begins with the list that appears in my phone three weeks out, unasked-for, because my mind started the logistics automatically. It begins with the realisation that one of us has organised passports and one of us knows where the passports are, and those are not the same skill. It begins with the question is there anything you need me to do? — which is a kind question, genuinely offered, but which contains within it the assumption that I already know the complete list and am currently managing access to it.

I have been the person who packs the bag. I am extremely good at it. I always have the right adaptor, the snacks, the thing for the ears on the plane. Nobody asks how I know to bring these things, because the answer is that I thought about it for three weeks before we left.

This year I am trying something different, which is to distribute the thinking before the packing. Not the list — the ownership of sections of the list. Not can you pack the snacks but can you own everything we need for the journey itself.

The difference is: one of these ends with me writing a list that someone else executes, and one of these ends with someone else having thought about it from the beginning.

We leave next week. I genuinely don't know if he'll have thought about the ear things.

I'm trying to be comfortable with that.