Trash in the unlikely places

Since my last entry, I got engaged, got married, and moved to Portland, Oregon, with my husband. We’re both involved with summer internships. He’s at Toyota doing supply chain things. I’m at Pacific Seafood doing social media things. It’s been adventurous and blissful and so, so chaotic.

Yesterday afternoon, I volunteered my lunch break to take a trash bag and go remove waste from the streets surrounding my office building. It was part of a company-wide effort to promote cleaner environments in support of World Oceans Day. Our different locations all over the United States shared their efforts to collect trash. Hundreds of people gathered hundreds of bags’ worth.

I spent one hour filling one bag, moving slowly so that I could get as many cigarette butts as possible. I stopped multiple times to carefully pick up piles of broken glass. While this took a lot of physical effort, it didn’t do much to substantially fill my bag.

Eventually winding my way down and around the corner to our next building, I felt determined to not return to the office until my bag was brimming with waste that I’d cleared off the roads. But my fellow workers who were also cleaning the streets had done such a good job that there weren’t many large pieces of trash left to collect.

Further and further I went along the fences until finally, I found myself behind a restaurant wholesaler’s building. The fences here were hard to scour due to the large, leafy bushes and hedges planted close to them, but in the short time that I’d been cleaning up, I’d found that it was against the bottoms of the fences where the trash often ended up.

Sure enough, as I squeezed into that tiny space between the hedges and the fence, I found piles of discarded trash and waste that quickly filled my bag.

For a moment, I felt proud knowing I’d be bringing back a load I felt my efforts had merited.

But then I was struck by a wave of gratitude for the people who were out doing the same thing. 

I feel as though, slowly but surely, we are beginning to take better care of the world. People like my associates at Pacific Seafood are working to make the planet healthier. There are more of us out there who are stubborn enough to seek out the piles of trash in the unlikely places. We are willing to do a little more grunt work to get the garbage out.

And, quietly in my mind, I prayed that these same efforts will continue to multiply for other causes, too. I prayed that more stubborn ones will stay beside their friends through the middle of mental health crises. I prayed that more stubborn voices will be courageous enough to stick up for injustices. I prayed that more people would be stubborn enough to be proud of who they are, to seek out their goals and aspirations in the unlikely places.

I’ve been lucky enough to have stubborn people in my life. The ones who sit with me when I feel alone. The ones who push me when I think I can’t do it. The ones who teach me new things every day by living their life differently than I do and cultivating joy within it. My husband, who is my anchor in all things and tells me I am strong on the days I feel the weakest.

There’s a lot of metaphorical trash caught in our unlikely, inconvenient, out-of-sight places.

The stubbornness to stick to our goals and make a difference however we can is what’s going to help make the world a better place. It’s what’s going to foster healthier minds and bodies and communities.