Stuck With Someone Else's Garbage

While I was driving to the mall, last week, one of my neighbors called my cell phone and asked if my son could possibly take her trash can to the curb for her, since she and her husband were out of town. My son, who was sitting in the car and heard the conversation, promptly agreed to help.

We got to the mall, shopped and talked, drank coffee, ate dinner and took my daughter to the play area; by the time we got home, we pulled directly into the garage and completely forgot about the neighbor’s garbage. The next morning, I watched the collectors drive in front of my house, stop at the curb and empty the receptacles – my husband had taken ours out before going to work -- and still no recollection of my neighbor’s trash can swam up to the surface. I walked outside to put a few pieces of mail into the mailbox and watched another neighbor wheel his receptacle back into the garage, and suddenly I remembered!

Praying in my heart that my son had remembered and had gone to the neighbor’s house after we got home without telling me, I glimpsed the curb, and to my expected disappointment, I knew he had forgotten as well. I felt terrible. I walked back to my house and looked up the number for solid waste collection, hoping that, if the truck was still in the vicinity, it could detour a bit and come back by. No such luck. The truck had already left my subdivision and I would have had to pay $50 for them to come back around. Attempting to be helpful, the person who took the call suggested I drive to the nearest landfill.

After hanging up the phone I weighed the landfill option – I drive a small sport car which could never house such a big receptacle, so maybe I could just take the bags out of it and fit them in the trunk somehow…

That idea quickly dissolved like fog in bright sunshine the moment I lifted the lid. Filled to the rim, the stench was overwhelming even in the open air; there was no way I could load those bags into my car. So, I was left with one final option…asking my husband to come to the rescue. I called him on his cell phone while he was picking up our son from Drivers Ed, and explained the situation. Though not happy about it, he drove back to work, borrowed his brother’s pick up truck and came back to load my neighbor’s garbage receptacle to empty it at the dumpster behind his business.

Within thirty minutes he was there, and he and my son took care of the dreaded chore. While I waited for them to come back home with the empty trash can, I thought of how unsettling it is to remain stuck with someone else’s garbage. Even if in this situation I had ‘stuck’ myself with it by forgetting something I had committed to do, there have been times when I have been an unwilling recipient of emotional garbage because I haven’t set proper boundaries.

Many mistakenly believe that by setting boundaries they will be less compassionate, while in most cases it is quite the opposite. One can be compassionate and able to sympathize with a family member better if their point of perspective is fresh and untainted. If, on the other hand, one is busy carrying one’s own personal garbage and that of others on top of it, this person will be completely overwhelmed and will be of little help to anyone.

My consulting editor, Dena, has come up with a genial way of being involved without being sucked into the drama of others, and she has brilliantly called it ‘being compassionately detached.’

Agreeing to be compassionately detached allows one to be open up to the energy of others and encourage them toward seeking a solution, while avoiding to remain stuck into someone else’s drama. Each person has a path to walk and lessons to learn, and sometimes wishing them well on their journeys is all one can do.

The "Tired" Vacuum Cleaner

The past few days it has been late spring cleaning time at the Carrington-Smiths. With two very busy months behind, one kid ready to travel and two more eager to start their summer fun, April cleaning has had no choice but become June cleaning.

My daughter, typically unwilling to attend chores she could help with but hell-bent on mastering tasks out of her league, begged for a chance at proving her domestic skills. After careful pondering and a lot of negotiations – to include a small bonus attached to her weekly allowance – she settled on vacuuming the stairs with a small Dirt Devil.

She was on a mission. Armed with the small vacuum, she walked resolutely toward the first staircase, ready to suck the life out of every dust particle in her path. Her enthusiasm lasted about five minutes until she reached the fifth step; after that, she came down with a defeated look, informing me that the vacuum cleaner was ‘tired.’

Having seen many strange things in my day, but never having run into a tired vacuum cleaner, I set out to diagnose the sudden illness. Easier than assessing a childhood disease, it didn’t take long to determine that the refusal of the vacuum to cooperate in our cleaning effort was due to a dirty filter. Seeing that Morgan’s face still appeared a bit cloudy after my prompt intervention, I asked her what was wrong, so she took me by the hand and showed me a small trail of small clumps of dust and tiny particles of unidentified objects that came pouring down when she turned the vacuum cleaner upside down on her way to get help. “It spilled back out, Mom,” she said, “I vacuumed it up but it wouldn’t stay in.” Not wanting her to feel disappointed, I used the now clean vacuum cleaner to suck up the small pile; then, holding the little gadget up to avoid another spill, I went to empty into the trash.

A small, mindless chore; yet, it reminded me of how ‘garbage’ from the past can clog our inner filters to the point that we are not even able to pick up current debris, thus causing us to fail in the goals we presently have in mind. Surely, cleansing our mental filters is more challenging than cleaning dust out of a small Dirt Devil, but allowing ‘big clumps’ of past issues pile up is a choice we make, and one we can always change. Keeping the “old dust” in doesn’t necessarily translate into getting rid of it – it merely means that we have moved it from one place and stored it into another. We might never end up with a completely clean, factory-pristine filter, but we will at least know we have room to do away with the debris littering our present path.

The Dreaded Toy

‘Then it shall come to pass, that the sword, which ye feared, shall overtake you there in the land of Egypt, and the famine, whereof ye were afraid, shall follow close after you there in Egypt; and there ye shall die.” ~ Jeremiah 42:16


Every so often, my daughter falls in love with a new film. The latest choice is the ever popular ET, the film that conquered the hearts of young and old over two decades ago. The other day, since it was very hot outside, she asked if we could just get some popcorn and watch ET together, so we settled in and got the movie started.

It was really interesting to watch her reaction when Elliott and his brother first run into ET – she laughed and thought ET was hilarious when he got scared and screamed. Her response set my thoughts off down a path that led to the day my eldest son watched the same movie for the first time. When ET screamed, he jumped out of his skin! After that, he was afraid of ET for years, and could not even look at pictures of it.

Several years after this particularly traumatizing episode, I took him and his brother to browse ‘Toys ’r Us’ before Christmas, with the intent of gathering ideas for Santa’s list. We walked around different aisles, and looked at different toys. Suddenly, one toy fell from a top shelf and landed directly on Stephen; when I looked at the toy I held my breath…it was a stuffed ET! Michael saw it, too, and instantly glanced at his brother who, in that moment, was still trying to absorb the terrifying reality of it and had automatically turned pale as a ghost. He was frozen in panic; so much in fact, that his mouth opened and closed, and then opened again without even uttering a single word.

A teenager now, Stephen is obviously no longer afraid of a fictional character, but throughout the years I have always found it fascinating how of all the toys that could have fallen, ET had to be the one. What he was most afraid of had found a way to haunt him in the craziest of ways.

After the “ET accident” I started paying attention to the fear patterns of people I knew, including myself. It never failed – the more one was afraid of something, the more the object of their fear would materialize in their lives. I’ve known some whose biggest fear was to be penniless, and most of them struggled with money the majority of their time; I’ve met people who were afraid to be abandoned or not be loved, and somehow, they found themselves walking the very same path they dreaded. I was afraid of spiders and, somehow, there used to always be one in close proximity every time I turned around. When I got over that fear, spiders suddenly migrated away from me.

Thoughts void of emotions flow through our minds constantly, but if not paid much attention, they just become reabsorbed by the collective consciousness; however, when thoughts are fueled by a powerful emotional charge such as fear, they suddenly vibrate at a higher level, strong enough to manifest into one’s reality.

I believe that Stephen learned a hard lesson that day, one I think he will never forget. To date, he smiles whenever he sees an image of ET. His own little personal demon had come to get him, but once he was able to breathe again, he realized it was nothing he couldn’t put back on a shelf.