In a recent conversation with a friend I heard words that I have often thought myself about various parts of my life. She spoke with pain about abusive relationships she'd been in, the freedom she might have enjoyed to have fun and date if she'd been more empowered.
"What a waste." she said.
And I felt it. It's such a painful feeling to be a bit older, a bit wiser and to see how different things might have been, how much more beautiful they could have been - to see others who are now the age we were then doing the things we wished we'd done then and to feel this deep envy and yearning to turn back the clock rather than find ourselves in the times we are in.
"If only," as the song goes. "I were 18 again."
But what if there are no wasted years?
"Our problem is not that as children our needs were unmet, but that, as adults, they are still unmourned! In fact, neediness itself tells us nothing about how much we need from others; it tells us how much we need to grieve the irrevocably barren past and evoke our own inner source of nurturance. What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let go of. We are grieving the irretrievable aspect of what we lost and the irreplaceable aspect of what we missed. Only these two realizations led to resolution of grief because only these acknowledge, without denial, how truly bereft we were or are. From the pit of this deep admission that something is irrevocably over and gone we finally stand clear of the insatiable need to find it again from our parents or partner. To have sought it was to have denied how utter was its absence." - David Richo
This makes me think of someone I used to know who ran a beautiful little endeavour in Edmonton called Green Grease. Restaurants create a lot of grease which they need to dispose of and he collected it to turn it into biodeisel to run rides for the world's first green carnival (which he also ran).
It makes me think of seacans, those big old shipping containers that some are turning into houses.
It makes me think of the Gaelic language and the John Shaw who travelled around Cape Breton collecting stories and songs of the native speakers.
It makes me think about how Edmonton's recycling plant recycles almost all of the garbage we throw out and even turns it into gas, which fuel a portion of the garbage collection trucks so that our garbage is picked up by... our garbage.
It makes me think of redemption - the redeeming of things by buying them for nickles on the dollar because no one values them anymore and restoring them to their valued and esteemed place in the world.
It makes me think, perhaps most of all, about how we think about 'waste'.
It makes me think of the modern notion of 'throwing things away' when, in reality, there is no 'away' to send it too. It's still here on the planet with us but in landfills that leach their toxic ooze into the soil or collecting into huge islands of plastic in the ocean. The notions that parts of us and parts of our life are garbage that can, and should, be thrown away ignores the reality that there is no 'away' to throw it. It's still there inside of us.
And if it's still there, then the question becomes, "What are we going to do about it?"
It makes me think of what a skewed sense we have of what is wasted anyway. If a tree falls in a forest does it have a use still or is it waste? When a tree dies, still standing it will "provide homes for birds who carve nests out of the softening wood. Squirrels, too, like there, as do many other mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, and reptiles. Fungi love standing dead trees, and many creatures love to eat fungi. When these trees fall, they remain habitat, though now for different creatures. They store water, and as they rot, they serve as 'nurse trees' to provide nutrients for the next generation." - Derrick Jensen, Strangely Like War
When you die, or rather, if you were to die in some intact, traditional culture, you would be buried in the ground, or out in a boat and set on fire or in some way be returned to the Earth. Your death would, very literally, feed something. Death, considered the ultimate 'waste of a life', is actually the cradle from which all life comes. Dirt is made up of everything that failed to live forever and yet it grows all of our food.
If you die in this society at this time, everything possible is done to make sure you never return to the Earth and that the Earth is further damaged in the process. Instead of your death feeding nature it poisons it (via embalming fluids, the immense energy used for cremation, the toxic boxes we're buried in etc.)
What if there are no wasted years?
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We look at the grease bins from restaurant and imagine them to be full of waste. The seacans, the old languages, our garbage and all of our mistakes and regrets in the past... it's all waste.
So, what is waste in this culture?
Waste is what we can't use. Waste is the unfortunate bi-product of some other thing. Waste is beneath us and unworthy of use. Or, more to the point, waste is what we imagine to be unusable.
So what happens when we lable parts of our past as a waste?
One of the first things it does is render invisible any of the beauty and goodness that was there. It can feel as if honouring the good somehow condones the bad.
But the biggest impact is that we ignore it.
But, looked at from another angle, what if waste wasn't some inherent characteristic of a thing. What if there was no essence or spirit of waste that imbued a thing. What if, instead, waste was a result only of how we look at and relate to a thing? What if waste was only waste when we turned it into waste by the manner of our approach to it? What if waste described less the things incapacity for any use and more our lack of skillfulness in finding a use for it. What if it was less about the lack of possibilities for use and more about a lack of an openminded wondering about where it might yet find employment?
What if there is no such thing as waste? What if there were only resources.
What if there are no wasted years?
What if waste is a nominalization? A process of wasting turned into a thing called waste? What if waste is a lens we see through and not the thing itself.
What if there are no wasted years?
What if all of those years might yet find some use or employment in the making of a better life for ourselves and others.
What if the best we can say about those years is, "I haven't found a use for those years... yet."
Maybe it's because we see the past as some unreachable land. Lost. Beyond the reach of even the most skillful redeemer. Gone.
But what if the past hasn't gone anywhere? What if it is still there in not only our memories, but in our body and the world around us? What if the present is made up entirely of the past?
What if those years were not a waste but that, until now, we have been wasting them like one might imagine the withering gaze of some evil spirit turning an apple rotten - wasting away.
What if there are no wasted years?
Of course, this means labour. This means work and heavy lifting to reconsider things. I suppose it's easier to not do this.
It would have been easier for that fellow to not collect that grease and create such an inspiring festival. It would have been easier to let those seacans rust.
It takes effort to make something beautiful. It takes work to find it, collect it and work with it so that it's a gift to the community.
Redemption costs us something - primarily we pay for it with the story of waste. That’s the price. Not letting that story be wasted anymore. That story becomes the compost for growing the fruit of redemption. Perhaps we pay for the redeeming of something or someone by letting go of the story about how useless it is.
I think of tattoo artists who turn women's scars from mastectomies into art.
I think of people who find scrap wood and make human beauty of it.
I think of poets who take suffering and turn it into praise for life and consolation for the grieving.
I think of the people who work with street youth who have been discarded by society and feeding them with love so that their inner sense of worthiness can sprout.
I think most of us won't be very good at it when we first try. But I think most artists aren't very good when they first try anything.
What if there are no wasted years?
What if those things we consider to be the greatest wastes are calling out deeper parts of us, capacities we didn't know we had.
What if nothing wants to be discarded?
What if everything wants to be redeemed?
What if our redemption lies, primarily, in the hands of others?
I suppose this leaves me with one final thought. We live in an inanimist time where only humans are really alive (and mostly rich, white, men - their lives are the most important and 'lifey' - poor brown people much less so). Animals? Sure... they 'alivish'. Plants? Well... a lower order of 'alive' okay. Rocks? No. The planet? Definitely not. The sky? The stars? No. Spirits of a place? Not real and therefore not alive. The one true God? The most alive.
I think an invitation of these times is to look at everything and ask ourselves, "Are you alive or not?"
But even that is the wrong question because the aliveness of things is so affected by our recognition of that fact. We all know how babies do when not touched or how people fare when shunned for years or put in solitary confinement. See how unaffected you are when looked at with suspicion for all of your days. The power we have over the realness of each other is more vast than we know.
And if there is some inherent, indwelling life of everything, maybe it might sound like, "How can I help?" Maybe it's all anything alive wants to do - create more life (even if that role is to end life and thus create food for other life). Maybe it’s what we all want, to find some employment, some role, some meaningful function in the way things are.
What if we proceeded as if it were all alive?
What if that included all of those wasted years?
What if nothing wants to be discarded?
What if everything wants to be redeemed?
When you say, "Those years were a waste" you're not describing the past, you're describing what you are, in the present moment, doing to the past.
If it were alive, the neglect we've given to it might have been painful for it. The way we looked at it as being a waste might have done a number on it and turned it into a ghost of what it might have been. If it were alive it our conduct might have been akin to looking at someone without a home, dishevelled and hungry and spitting out the words, "Fuck you. You're no fucking use to anybody." When it was us who made them homeless. When it was us who starved them.
If it were alive, it might end up causing trouble when it's tired of being neglected and put down. And that trouble might spill over the edges of the cup of our personal life onto the collective floor of our community. If it were alive it wouldn't just be for our own selfish benefit that we'd engage in the hard labour of learning it, feeding it and redeeming it. If it were alive then our neglect would have consequence for others.
If it were alive, then it would need food. And maybe the form that food takes is our love, attention and willingness to be guided by it.
If the past were alive, it would want to feed something.
If it were alive, then we might be able to ask it things.
"What gifts have your brought to me that I hadn't yet seen? What gifts might still be there unharvested? What employment might be found for you in the life of this community? What do I know now because of you that I might not have known without you? How have you prepared me to help others in ways I would have been useless to without you? What is it that you most want to become?"
When you say, "Those years were a waste" you're not describing the past, you're describing what you are, in the present moment, doing to the past.
And, tragically, every second spent on regretting the past is a second not being alive here in the present, in the only life we get.
What if there are no wasted years?
The effort to redeem is not always successful but it is never a waste.
In the end, there's nothing to be done with those years. There's just something to see. And when we see it differently, we will know what to do. The seeing things differently is the beginning of the redemption. What it takes to see something differently, that hard labour, is the redemption process in action. When we no longer see it as garbage or as waste but as a life giving resources - when we even open to the possibility and rumour that it might be that... that willingness might be all we need.
Maybe there are no years of our life that are a waste.
But there are many years of our life we may yet be wasting like seeds wanting nothing more than to be planted in the soil of our daily devotions, like a too long ignored guest craving to find their place at the table of honour in the mead hall of our consideration.
i feel like theres a contradiction between the gist of the whole piece and the idea that we need just to grieve. maybe there doesn't have to be. but there can be.
trying to make something of our awful experiences can become a distraction and a trap, another way to avoid feeling grief
whats needed for us to be able to feel grief is being safe enough to feel it...and if we aren't in my experience thats when we revert to trying to make something not be grievous. if we can keep holding to what we got out of or what we might have learned and still might learn from awful times, we don't have to face the grief. its a good strategy and needed at times, but it doesn't actually do what grieving does.
maybe its different for you, I'd be interested in your thoughts on that
I’m of the same mind. Deeply grateful to have been graced by many wise and loving folks helping me to grieve and to redeem the many deaths, regrets and losses. I have none left. Just grateful I get to wake up another day, breathe another breath, make more “mistakes” or rather stumbles and attempts at filling my soul’s many bowls of hunger...