Time goes by so quickly! Its already May! May is my favourite month in Europe. Everything is super lush and juicy green. Just looking out the window at the trees is instant stress relief.
My challenge this month has to do with celebrating the beauty. By cleaning up.
This month I challenge you to pick up and properly dispose of 2 (or more?) pieces of litter every day.
That’s annoying and gross? Maybe. But it’s also satisfying. You are walking in the forest and before you were there there was an empty bag of crisps and a bottle cap there, and after you passed through they are gone. You can be the secret spirit of your local green spaces, making them more beautiful. It might just give you a little sense of control in turbulent times. Almost like a daily meditation practice.
It can help to have a plastic bag with you when you go out. Then you don’t have to touch gross pieces with your hands. Just flip your bag inside out an use it like a glove to grab things. And you have something to carry your bounty with you until you find a bin.
Or use some cleaner litter as a “glove” for less nice litter.
You can also consider making this challenge a social media thing. You know those apps where you video record one second of your life every day and at the end of the month you have a 30 second video of memories? Well, you could use that to record yourself picking up two pieces of trash every day and post the compilation after a month, challenging friends to join in.
You could also simply photo document your individual pieces of trash in some artistic or puristic way and post everyday with a #trashtag.
You can also put before and after images of the place you freed of litter next to each other. In that case I would choose a backdrop where your removal of 2 pieces leaves the picture pristine looking. But that’s up to you and your artistic expression.
I want to finish this post by saying that picking up litter is a wonderful and important deed, but we must also continue to put pressure on the companies producing the packaging to take responsibility of the fact that they are producing, well trash. A while back, I listened to this interesting podcast on the matter, some of you might enjoy listening to it as well.
**Title image by Nicolás Beltrán López; “Do good things daily” by Jasper Garratt.
** I do not receive any kind of remuneration for promoting any links in this post. I just put them on this page because I truly thing they are worth sharing.