I put my rubbish in the kitchen bin. I tie the rubbish bag and put it in the outside bin. I put the outside bin on the nature strip and the truck comes around once a week and collects the rubbish. I bring the bin back in. I put more rubbish in the kitchen bin -> outside bin -> collected by truck -> repeat multiple times a week for 52 rubbish collections a year times however many years I am on this earth for.
How many bags of rubbish have I created already and how many more will I create in my lifetime? Where is all this rubbish going and how much of this rubbish will outlive me and how much of this rubbish will directly or indirectly hurt the plant and animal life and air and water on this planet? How much of this rubbish will go back into the cycle of positive consumption (like kitchen scraps -> garden compost) and how much of the rubbish I produce will have a net neutral effect (eg recycling? I don’t even know how that works, but I can theorize)?
Why have I spent nearly 4 decades on this planet and I still don’t know how rubbish systems work? Is it just me that doesn’t know, or do most people not know? How does one learn? I know I can just google it but it feels like a daunting thing, to begin to learn? I want to learn though. This post is me mentally preparing myself to begin learning. I want to know where my rubbish goes and I want to know how to be better for the planet. I want to stop being ignorant, I want to learn to use less plastic, I want to throw away less rubbish that will outlive me and hurt the planet.
Jean-Paul Sartre said in his 1946 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, “there is no reality except in action… there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art. The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing. Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait.”
I’m not 100% sure how this relates to the rest of what I just said but I know it does and it’s late at night so I’m going to stop here and figure it out later. Just like I’m going to figure out later where the rubbish goes and what I need to do about it.
Mouthful of Ahimsa 