During lunch with my good friend Di, she told me about a lecture she attended at a spiritual retreat she went to a few years ago. One of the contents of the lecture she said that made her see herself in a different light was when the lecturer said each of us is a caretaker of the earth.
I really like the word. The caretaker. Just imagine, if each of us begins to see ourselves as a Caretaker of our planet, perhaps we will take pride tokeep clean our home. This is the only home we have. We have nowhere else to go. It is not like we can hop into an escape pod that will take us to a nearest-possible-habitable-planet 20 light years away.
I cringe everytime I see people simply toss away a candy wrapper, cigarette butt, empty coffee cup or anything that should be in a trash bin onto the ground.
I think I was about four or five years old when I started to develop a habit to keep any candy wrappers (which was quite often) in my pocket. I didn't develop this habit on my own. It came through my mother. She was serious about it.
Once she made me picked up an ice cream wrapper that I actually threw it in a trash can, but I missed it. Every time we had an outdoor family picnic, she wouldn't leave the place until we all picked up the nasi lemak wrappers and plastic bags.
Many years later when we were all in our 20's, I asked my mother why she was different from all other kids mothers that I knew. I didn't see thier mothers' made them pick up the candy wrappers they threw on the ground. As a matter of fact some of the mothers even threw the trash on the gound.
Mak told me, one night while she was standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes, and my father was sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper, my father read a column about Japanese mothers folded a plastic bag and put the bag in their kids' pockets. These bags were used to put away the trash. They would bring back the plastic bag to their homes.
Mak said, she liked the idea very much. And she practiced it on us. I'm glad she did.
There are many ways we can do to save our planet. Many, many ways like hold on to empty coffee cup until we see a trash bin, or check out this site, this, and you get the idea.
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