Letting Go – Day 16
30 Days of Letting Go Day 16
By Jenny Griffin
A Melting Pot of Letting Go: Recycling
Most people are familiar with the concept of recycling in their households. But how is it connected to letting go?
The first and most obvious way is that when we put an object in the recycling bin, we let go of it, physically and mentally. We’ve had from the object what we need/want and it’s now time to clear it from our minds and our homes. We don’t often lament the loss of a plastic bottle we recycled last week, or the tin can that we crushed. In fact, we let go of it ever having been a part of our lives, quite easily.
There’s amazing stuff that happens when our discarded items get to the recycling plant, though. Plastic bottles can be melted down and turned into polar fleece, which then comes back to us as something entirely new. We’ve let go of the need to define that bottle as simply a bottle, and have allowed for it to become something else. The bottle itself has been transformed. As it is an inanimate object, I won’t presume that it had any attachment to its former incarnation, but in our collective imagination, we have allowed it to let go of its already useful form to become something equally useful, and very different. When we encounter it in its new form, as polar fleece, we don’t usually feel melancholy that it has lost its ‘bottleness,’ but may marvel at the amazing technology that makes such a transformation possible.
