Going green on the inside

Thursday mornings are rubbish collection days in our neighbourhood and, while I confess that I don't exactly relish the task of tottering out to the pavement weighed down by black refuse bags that threaten to disgorge their less-than-fragrant contents at any moment all over my slippered feet, I am always conscious of gratitude that we live in an area where refuse removal is a regular service. The volume of waste one household can generate in a week is quite astonishing - almost as astonishing as the number of energetically-wriggling maggots that can hatch in that same time.

South Africans are (in the global context) rather late to the recycling party but progress has been made. Of course what precisely happens to all our carefully-separated items in their colour-coded bags after their ride on the municipal dump truck is somewhat unclear but it's a start, if only in educating the average householder to sort and separate. 

My son and his family live in Munich, where recycling is so entrenched that kitchen bins come with four compartments to facilitate the process. Paper is separated from hard plastic, while discarded food is saved for composting... and woe betide the recalcitrant resident who disposes of coloured glass in the same recycling bin as clear glass! It is a discipline that visitors have to learn (the threat of re-sorting the rubbish is a persuasive teacher) but I did notice that I soon became more mindful of waste in general. And that got me thinking...

There are several useful life lessons to be learned from our relationship with refuse. Archaeologists know that much can be deduced about a past civilization from a careful scrutiny of its middens. Anyone rooting through our household rubbish would not have to be Sherlock Holmes to conclude that someone consumes an inordinate quantity of yoghurt. Specifically, smooth yoghurt in ridiculously small tubs, in apparent disregard of the obvious economies of scale that would apply if we were to buy that same yoghurt in large tubs. This inquisitive person would not necessarily discern that our family includes a small boy on the autism spectrum with restrictive eating habits but I have no doubt that he (or she) would draw conclusions of some sort. What we throw away reveals something about us, from our culinary tastes and retail preferences to our economic well-being. And, of course, how 'green' we really are.

And then there is the 'rubbish' that litters our inner landscape. Some of it is the unavoidable detritus that accumulates from daily life, easily discarded and soon forgotten. But many of us have internal rubbish dumps that have not been cleared for far too long, with the result that our emotional environment is far from healthy. Part of that pile of rotting refuse might be the result of abuse and hurts that were dumped on you without your permission, while some may be anger and resentment you have chosen to hoard. Often we inherit rubbish from our parents, along with the feeling that we cannot dump what has defined our family for so long. Whatever its origin, the fact is that, like our physical rubbish, if we refuse to deal with our refuse, we will eventually be overcome by its toxic presence.

And this is where recycling comes in. As I observed earlier in this rather rambling rumination, sorting through your rubbish encourages mindfulness. And, just as when you are separating paper from plastic and cans from glass bottles, you need to pay attention to the internal rubbish you are sorting though. When it comes to our emotional refuse, there is some rubbish that should be swiftly scooped up and cast out, as far away from us as possible before it can poison our lives any further with feelings of failure and undeserved shame.  But then there are those difficult experiences that we have buried in our minds' middens which need to be exhumed and re-examined for the valuable lessons that can be learned from them. This type of rubbish makes valuable compost for personal growth and to merely discard it would be wasteful indeed.  

'Going green' is a lifestyle choice to develop a habit of dealing with the stuff of daily living in such a way as to cause as little harm as possible to the environment. The same principles apply to dealing with the daily stuff of our emotional  lives. It takes courage and discipline but with practice we can all develop the healthy habit of sorting, recycling and cleaning out our internal rubbish on a regular basis, leaving our inner landscapes as maggot-free and fragrant as the bins outside our kitchen doors.

And we don't even have to pay rates to do it!