Trash clean up and reflection experience.
In my journey to gain perspective I found myself getting lost in all of the information that I was submerging myself in. Everything about the topic of homelessness is pretty overwhelming and before this project I didn’t realize how close to home it would hit and how emotionally invested in it I would become. When things fell through volunteering at the place I originally wanted to volunteer at I realized that time was going by quickly. So to keep up with my weekly volunteer hour requirement I began to pick up garbage along the train tracks near my home. I often see homeless people and travelers walking along the tracks because it is near downtown and there are some trees for shelter that some people seek refuge in at night. So in short there is a pretty good accumulation of trash. So a few during the week I would go and collect trash for about 2 hours and then sit in this nice spot I found that overlooks a part of the train tracks I cleaned up and meditate and write in my reflection journal for the quarter.
My look out spot where I would sit and reflect on my project.
This experience was one of the most helpful components of my project. It gave me time to really think about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and who I was doing it for. When I started picking up trash I was just picking up trash, and now when I just finished my 26th hour of Operation Clean Up the Tracks I was doing so much more than just cleaning. I found it really hard to be able to put it into words. The most I can say is that when I cleaned up that ground I thought, I thought about everything I was doing. I thought not as a whole but I paid attention to every piece of my life. I thought of things as individual items that belonged to a whole instead of just the big picture. Blocks, pieces of a whole, steps to making something better, small things add up, small goals. I thought about how every little thing I was doing in that moment that seemed insignificant added up overtime. That the first two hours of trash clean up didn’t really make a difference but 26 hours did. Now it looks different because of every little piece I picked up. Every small thing matters.
It helped me come to the idea that if we as people can remedy, clean up, fix, complete small things one at a time little by little, it will add up and over time you will have something worth so much more than all of those little accomplishments. Over the past ten weeks when these ideas have been coming to me I wasn’t sure what to do about it. So to test it out, I decided to apply these things to my own life; low and behold it worked. If I made small goals, and I mean very small trivial sounding goals the more of them I would complete because they were easy. The more I completed the better I felt about it and the more it motivated me to do them, getting me out of my unproductive attitude. Every day I worked at it, it got easier and easier to complete the goals that I would set for myself daily.
When I first decided that I was going to pick up trash I was not excited about it, but by the end I really came to enjoy my trash pick-up time and I think I am going to continue to keep it up as much as I can, because the reflection aspect of it is something that has added something really needed and special in my life.
Picking up trash is one thing I could do to add beauty in a sometimes overwhelmingly not beautiful situation.