Will it ever matter?

I am having a particularly hard time at work these past few weeks. One situation has sent my left brain into overdrive over the details and the right brain reeling with emotion. I am actually up right now hoping that emptying the contents of said hemispheres onto these pages will give me enough quiet for actual sleep. But… As the minutes tick on…. I am not sure that is a possibility anymore. I will just have to reap it back over the weekend. I hope.

As I go through all of this in my head – I wonder if anyone besides me thinks about the luggage we give others to carry. I think deeply about the people that I have hurt or made uncomfortably (that I know of) and have been sorry for. I hope and pray that I haven’t made the load they’ll carry to the end so much more unbearable than it already was. But I fear that I am the only one agonizing about that ultimately. People in this world dump on you the same way they throw their garbage out. They bag it up (and sometimes don’t) and toss it in your direction and never think on it again. But their rubbish has effects that live well beyond their concern. It has environmental effects. It has effects on all the people who have to handle it… See what can still be made use of and recycled versus what will sit and rot ad infinitum. I read a statistic the other day that it takes one disposable diaper 500 to biodegrade. And America alone? Disposes of 29 Billion of them yearly. I mean… Just to begin to do that math boggles my mind. And out of necessity. We all do it. We change our babies and toss the diapers away and maybe never think of them again. Some people do and care enough to use cloth diapers which take more time and patience, but they’ve thought through what their contribution to the decay of the world would ultimately be. But the percentage of them versus the ones that have seemingly better things to think about is negligible.

In the end, the garbage you dump on those around you will take its toll – and maybe not on you at all directly. But can you live with what if does to another human being? Karma is real whether you believe in it or not. The decay of the world will eventually make you care whether you want to or not – will you own up to what part you took in its destruction?

How about for what part you took in the weighing down of a fellow human?

You don’t have to think about it I suppose. The universe has this covered.

*