The Jewel Buried in the Trash
One of the things I really appreciate about spending all this time in places like Thailand and India is how widespread and in your face the waste is. Many tourists are deeply bothered by this. They are accustomed to elaborate disposal systems that have developed over many decades which hide all these heaping piles of plastic waste outside of plain view.
Not me though. I appreciate the reminder. It serves as a reminder underscoring the pathological nature or our condition. A reminder of how callous and disconnected to life we have collectively become, and how we are approaching the death throes of this old story which can no longer be sustained. The trash is just a symptom for the loss of the sacredness that permeates our lives.
I like to carry this reminder with me. And each morning, when I say to the fruit stand lady “muai ao tung” (no plastic bag), I feel a twinge of pain in my heart for the loss of this sacred. But I feel. That’s the whole point. I feel, and I sit with this feeling, I don’t run from it.
So many people seem too scared to sit with this feeling though. Many of us have at least some sense of the depth of the planetary destruction that’s taking place, but few seem willing to look directly at it. They fear a viscous spiral into helpless victim-hood, despair and depression. So they not only divert their gaze, but they also close their hearts.
We close our hearts as a survival mechanism. We fear to explore the depths of our problems, and the suffering that it gives rise to, because we believe the pain we feel will be too unbearable to take in thereby rendering us paralyzed.
This is a catastrophic miscalculation on our part however. Not only for the welfare of our planet and the future prospects for the survival of our species, but I mean miscalculation in the most base selfish sense: as a means in maximizing our moment to moment sense of well-being.
By refusing to see reality as it is, by closing off our perceived self from all the casualties in the name of “progress” and “development”, we stymie our capacity to feel in all aspects of our emotional spectrum. We want the heightened states, the joy, the connection, the meaning, but we can’t get there without owning the pain, the suffering and the fundamental not-knowing that is existence. They are the other side of the same coin.
But I digress, I was saying how much I value these reminders. For me, the reminders give me strength. They give me strength in conviction of the absolute necessity of creating a new story, a new way of being, which aligns my personal well-being with the well-being of the planet. I know this new story must start from precisely where I find myself, so it imbues within me an unbridled enthusiasm to hold myself accountable for how I live, first and foremost. I feel overcome with meaning and purpose in my interactions with the world precisely because I feel the world as alive. Since I feel all the world as alive, it thereby makes me feel alive as well.
In other words, by opening the floodgates to the pain that exists all around me, I open up the possibility to really feel. And when you look around you, is it not a fundamental failure of feeling at the heart of our primordial dis-ease?
Many of us have a deep yearning to live a more beautiful life in a more beautiful world. But we often are so quick to look for solutions outside of ourselves. But what if we approach our crisis from a different vantage?
What if we just stop for a moment and listen? What if we let curiosity, humility and kindness guide us? And when we sense this incessant grasping for more — more stuff, more power, more recognition, this never-ending treadmill of mores — what if we just sit with this urge and be still? What arises? What do you feel?
There’s a pithy saying I once heard that seems relevant: “if you wanna fly, you gotta let go of all the shit weighing you down”. I suspect much of what is weighing us down — individually and collectively — is from all the blockages and blind spots that have developed as a result of our unwillingness to truly feel. And this unwillingness is predicated on a false narrative — a story that says we are separate beings, atoms glued together by chance, existing in a world that is fundamentally hostile to us. This story, on some level, exists deep in the depths of each of our consciousness. But other narratives are possible.
We are the story tellers after all; we are not separate from the culture that we exist within but are each co-creators (as the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler would often say, “this is a participatory universe”). And this new story starts right here and now with our willingness to simply stop and listen.
