Each day I continue to garner additional tidbits of information regarding everyday life in Cozumel. Just five short weeks ago, I believed I had figured out everything there is to know about “taking out the garbage” here. As the weeks have passed by, I continue to gain more understanding, even about such a simple basic subject.
A twinge of judgment shot through me when I noticed for the first time that my neighbors down the street had simply suspended several small grocery bags of smelly trash from the top wires of a shabby chain link fence next to their home. “Why would they do that?” I silently judged. “Don’t they have the common sense to just carry those bags across the street and toss them into the garbage cans?”
I felt quite humbled last week when I observed the garbage truck halt just opposite that fence. With my attention peaked, I watched a young worker run out, retrieve several bags of trash from the fence, and casually toss them into the back of the truck.
“That is just the way it is done here,” I pondered, as I realized that once again, I had jumped to erroneous judgments—basing my opinions only on my personal past experience.
Some neighbors down the street simply leave bags of trash on the sidewalk. The owner of the little BBQ chicken store on the corner just stacks old meat boxes behind his shop by the sidewalk. Almost daily, the garbage workers gather up and discard each of these piles as they scurry by. There seems to be no fixed schedule. At times I see the garbage trucks drive by during the middle of the day. Several times I have seen them drive by at 10:00 p.m. or even later. Once, while watching the early morning sunrise, I witnessed a small garbage truck stop at the mouth of the narrow row of homes just below my roof, as several young workers ran down the street gathering up all of the refuse.
This morning, I was filled with a new sense of respect as I sat down to write. Almost immediately after plopping my backpack down on my favorite bench, I observed a small pickup truck slowly inch its way through the plaza. Several workers quietly ran around shadowing the truck, emptying a variety of trash containers into large black plastic bags and tossing those bags into the back of the truck. Then I witnessed one worker walk over to a large blue plastic garbage container—similar to the residential ones we use in Utah. Opening the lid, this young man proceeded to manually empty the contents. Using his bare hands, he first picked out the larger contents from the top, and placed them into a black garbage bag. Then, he and another co-worker picked up the large can and dumped the remaining contents into yet another bag.
“Wow, what dedication and hard work.” I thought to myself. On a daily basis, under hot sweaty conditions, these garbage workers perform an amazing service to their community. I have grown to take so many things for granted in our largely mechanized society back home.
As I listen to two particularly exuberant birds squawking away at each other in the tree above me, I am immersed in thought, pondering just how this whole “garbage collection” topic can apply to everyday life. I believe there are several lessons to be explored.
Several times during my short stay here in Cozumel, I have jumped to conclusions, believing I now knew all of the “facts.” Perception is such an amazing concept, such an automatic process. From the day we are born, we begin to collect “knowledge” about the expansive world around us. We categorize and store every encounter in our brain, gradually reducing each memory to simple words, labels, and emotions. It becomes so easy to slip into a place of unconsciousness in our lives, where everything around us in the magnificent present moment is quickly judged and perceived based on past experience. We are so intently focused on “what is next?” that we literally don’t see any of the magic going on around us “right now.”
It is as if we each have our own private pair of sun glasses, with the lenses being specially crafted from every element of our personal past experiences. As we stare at the world through these filtered lenses, literally everything we see is colored by our own past. We think we see the truth, but we really only see our perception, our interpretation of the truth. Returning to and focusing on the present moment is a wonderful way to begin “taking out the garbage” of the past, to help us see the “here and now” through clear lenses.
For example, the first time we encounter a new tree, such as the incredible orange flowering trees here in the plaza, the experience can be a magical exploration of the five senses. Such new experiences bring us into the moment, helping us to feel a sense of awe and wonder. After spending considerable time around the tree, however, we usually begin to think we already know everything about it, we spend less time observing its elegant details, and we begin to take it for granted.
One day, we might walk by and simply think “There is that ‘orange flowering tree.’” However, in thinking the words, we no longer actually see the magic of the tree. Perhaps we don’t even see the tree at all. It becomes a known and categorized entity—simply a label—a memory identified by a word or collection of words.
If we later happen upon another tree with orange blossoms, we do not even look at it to notice that it is unique and different. Perhaps the blossoms of this new tree have different shapes, or the seed pods hang differently. We don’t get close enough to feel the texture of the bark or notice that the leaves are fern-like. Because we think we already know what this tree is like, we simply judge it from past experience, past labels.
Yes, I was judging garbage collection through past experience and past labels, assuming I already knew everything there was to know. I was judging a few of my neighbors by assuming they should see things the way I see them—concluding that my past experience was the only valid method of viewing the situation. How fun it is as I begin to see a little more clearly.
Judgment is such a subtle, many-headed beast. Take for example, the young twenty-something man that I admire—the one that has the courage to dance solo in the plaza. With my darker lenses of the past I would have judged him as being a socially inept loser, dirty and sloppily dressed, incapable of having a relationship, too weird to get someone else to dance with him. Now, I don’t see outward appearances. Instead, I enjoy his beautiful energy as he expresses his soul with abandon through uninhibited dance.
I recognized a similar shift in perception with the little grandma that I danced with for most of Sunday evening. The old me would have looked at her and seen a squatty, heavy-set woman. I might have thought twice before being seen dancing with her. The new me thoroughly loved the experience and saw nothing but love and beauty in her eyes and soul. Yes, the old me would have missed a wonderful evening of dancing.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to imply any personal expertise in seeing through clear lenses. I trip and fall all the time. I am yet an infant, still growing everyday, continuing to work on shifting perceptions from fear to love. But I have experienced incredible shifts as I flow down my river of life. With every bend in my journey, I can say with absolute certainty that the view continues to grow increasingly more spectacular as I pass through each lesson in love and personal growth.
Throughout much of my life, I packed away stagnant, smelly, emotional garbage in the dark recesses of my soul, believing that if I buried it well enough the garbage would never again see the light of day. Guilt, shame, anger, victimization, judgment, and self-loathing were all composting in my hidden chambers. Some of this emotional garbage was piled up on sidewalks or hanging in bags from chain link fences, but most was buried in caves as it festered in the cold damp darkness. I used to believe that stuffing these emotions was the healthy way of dealing with them—but I have since learned that emotions buried alive never die. They simply build up pressure, forming volatile gases, waiting for opportunities to explode like volcanoes when you least expect them.
As I watched the young garbage workers this morning, working tirelessly under dirty and difficult conditions, I could not help but draw additional personal comparisons to my own process of internal excavations.
I would love to believe that I have already gone through the hardest parts of my healing journey—digging through and processing what I believe to be the biggest mother lodes of my buried past perceptions. The path has not been a graceful waltz. Much of the process has involved rivers of tears, puddles of perspiration, sleepless nights, and literal physical exhaustion. Emotional honesty and a willingness to get down on my hands and knees to dig even deeper, have been key elements in my ability to continue on. And yes, I recognize there may yet be more tears, more sleepless nights, more exhaustion to come, as I continue forward on my journey.
Every exhausting effort has been rewarded one thousand fold with joy, peace, love, gratitude, and happiness. The process began many years ago, and continues one small miracle at a time. With each miracle shift from fear to love, the newfound peace launches me willingly into my next perception-shifting adventure.
Just as these garbage workers in Cozumel have no fancy mechanized methods for removing the trash—neither do we. While some methods of taking out the trash are definitely quicker, perhaps even more efficient, every method requires a deep willingness, and an incredible amount of hard manual labor. This is not a resistance-free process, but the rewards are huge and begin immediately.
Like climbing a spiral staircase, we simply need to have the willingness to take the next step right in front of us. Each step gives us more confidence, more peace, more love, more joy. As we go around each bend in the staircase, more of our future path gradually unfolds ahead of us. We recognize that we are not there yet—there is still another step to take, and then another. But the higher we climb, the more joyous each step becomes, the more peace we encounter in our lives, and the more anxious we are to continue climbing. In fact, we begin to ascend even faster.
The journey at times can seem quite daunting. We tend to doubt our abilities and hesitate to venture the necessary risks. It feels easier to remain in the safety of our familiar known universe. But the climb up this spiral staircase does not have to be frightening or difficult; all it takes is a little willingness …
A little willingness … to take the next step
A little willingness … to look within
A little willingness … to risk opening up old painful wounds
A little willingness … to trust
A little willingness … to see things differently
A little willingness … to let go
A little willingness … to forgive
A little willingness … to be wrong about the past
A little willingness … to begin to love
A little willingness … to be vulnerable
A little willingness … to let emotions surface
A little willingness … to feel
A little willingness … to stand in the river of emotions
A little willingness … to love unconditionally
A little willingness … to do the right thing
A little willingness … to let go of expectations
A little willingness … to release judgments
A little willingness … to let go of our story
A little willingness … to shift our perceptions
Yes, taking out the emotional garbage requires a deep internal willingness—but it doesn’t have to be done all at once. We simply need start where we are, today, taking one small step at a time. Just as with the garbage collection in Cozumel, there is no fixed schedule for our own growth opportunities. Sometimes the experiences that will help us clear our garbage seem to stop by at the most inconvenient of times. Personal experience tells me that these unscheduled encounters often bring the most growth … if we are willing to lovingly embrace them.
If we but focus on being present, each moment of our life will reveal to us our next small step. We need but take advantage of the lessons that life puts before us as we practice shifting our perceptions from fear to love in each and every situation.
We often get impatient and fearful, believing that we cannot take a step until we can clearly see the big picture. “What if I am walking off in the wrong direction?” We might ask ourselves as we shrink away in fear, doing nothing, sitting around while waiting and hoping for additional directions.
The universe rarely gives us our own personal big picture to focus on. If we clearly saw our ultimate destination—and if we rushed off towards it—we would literally miss out on each of the small, individual, day-by-day experiences that actually provide us with opportunities to grow, to heal, and to learn to love unconditionally.
My adventure here in Cozumel would be far less interesting if I knew where this journey is taking me. The magic is in the not knowing, it is in the anticipation, the trusting, and the loving of the process. It is so much more fun to receive a gift when I don’t know what is underneath the wrapping paper.
Great joy comes from simply trusting each small step into the unknown, taking advantage of the growth opportunities presented to us by each step—namely learning to shift out of fear into a place of unconditional love. We grow in faith as we gradually learn to trust our own spiritual intuition by actually following the tiniest of promptings—even though these miniscule feelings might seem quite silly at the time.
If we can be trusting and patient with the universe, recognizing this truth, our reward is indeed a feeling of immediate deep peace. We no longer worry about where we are headed. The peace of the present moment is all we need.
© Brenda Larsen, 2009