The Treasure in the Trash

 My lunch friends and I regularly fight over trash. I don't quite remember when or how it started, just that somewhere through the stress of the winter and spring it turned into a bit of a game. Try to grab each other's trash before anyone else can - the sneakier the better. Or, sometimes even more connivingly, take someone else's trash with an "I dare you to stop me" look good enough to keep the forfeiter of trash to concede with minimal-to-no argument. Relationships sometimes come into play - the chief of which tends to be that if the patriarch of the group takes your trash, you don't argue - unless you're one of the ones actually related to him in which case you might stand a chance, though that depends on the day. Yet most of the time it's sideways glances waiting for someone to let their guard down, or trying to catch someone post-meal sleepiness or stress-induced haze so that you grab their trash before they can realize what's happened or when they don't have the energy to object.

Two of us tend to participate more than others, but each in the group takes their turn from time to time. The one who has only participated a time or two (and who most strongly objects to her trash being taken) makes fun of the others of us for our ridiculousness - and from the outside, she's not wrong. I'm sure it's humorous to watch the days that one of us slams a hand down on a trash pile (either our own or another's) to make sure that we can claim it before anyone else can. But what even she knows - what I think each of us knows - is that it was never about the trash.

It's been a difficult string of seasons for us. There have been minor shifts through each one, but they all begin to blend together. As I look back on my personal journey entries from a year ago, not much has changed, not really. While everything has increased in its felt intensity - for better or worse - the roots of everything remain the same. The strained relationships have grown heavier. The friendships have grown stronger. The logistical stressors remain the same while increasing in their frequency, urgency, and intensity. But the hardest part is that the further along in time we move, the more isolated it feels we become. From roles becoming more compartmentalized to tasks being so abundant that the opportunities to work directly together have diminished to near nothingness. Even the opportunities to process through challenges together during moments of rest often get interrupted by crises and outside drama these days. Everyone is struggling, but no one can offer constructive support.

Enter trash. It's not like it's any massive stressor to gather one's meal waste and walk it to the garbage can less than half the room away. We could each take care of our own without a second thought. But there is also a not-insignificant relief to spending those extra 10 seconds sitting, to remove the extra moments of transition (for those of us that struggle with such things), or to not be separated from those extra bits of conversation sometimes lost when walking just out of earshot of the table. It isn't a burden to throw away our own trash, and yet it somehow manages to be a momentary burden lifted to not have to.

The best part? It's also a momentary burden lifted to throw away another's trash. Because it was never about the trash. We've never been human trash pandas (or racoons as the everyday person likes to call them) trying to collect as much trash as possible. We were never fighting over the trash. We've been fighting over the opportunity to serve each other.

Now there's a danger to this when you're dealing with a group of people who each have their own level of independent streak. It can be easy to resent that someone is serving you by doing something you're fully capable of doing yourself - the days you resign yourself to defeat rather than accepting the gift. And if you lose at the game too many times in a row, there's a level of shame that can start to sink in about not serving enough - like the lovely stretch of weeks where I was in such a haze that I almost never managed to throw away my own trash much less anyone else's and started joking about "being really off my game" to deflect from how inadequate I felt for being more of a burden to others rather than a burden-bearer for others through that time. And there's also the danger of seeing it as a conquest won rather than an opportunity filled - the former being a power play while the latter displaying more humility. And it's a fine line to walk that's, at least speaking for myself, probably a 50/50 shot between success and failure.

Yet despite our moments of flawed attitude, the act itself manages to remain to be one of beauty. Because through the days and weeks and months that we cannot help to lighten each other's greater loads, we can take on one small task. We can bring a moment of lightheartedness through the "argument" of who will claim power over that day's trash. And, when we allow it, our souls can find moments of rest both in claiming the opportunities to be a servant and in submitting ourselves to allow others to serve and care for us. And some days, in all the stress and struggle, those moments are enough - at least to get us to the next moment. And in times like these when everything so often feels to be storm and stress, it's worth holding on to the small good things you've got.