Month: December 2013

Why Do People Leave Their Trash Behind In Public Places?

I have a few pet peeves in my life when it comes to things I see occurring in everyday life when I’m out and about. One of them deals specifically with something I’ve observed happening quite a bit lately. It’s when people don’t throw away their trash and expect someone else to do it.

It baffles me on why it’s so difficult for any individual to not discard their trash in a receptacle after they’re done with it. The most notorious place I see this happening is actually at the movie theater. When the lights come on at the end of a movie and people are scurrying out of their seats to leave the theater, I always see the many empty bags of popcorn, soda cups, and cardboard trays strewn across the seats everywhere. This constantly has made me wonder what people are really thinking when they leave their waste behind. My guess has always been that they’ve felt entitled to doing it. I have further fathomed that most probably make the assumption that they are paying for some staff person to clean up their mess because of their movie ticket purchase. While on some sense the money from a movie ticket might actually be paying for the employees of a theater to do their work, isn’t it really just a common courtesy to take our trash to the nearest garbage bin?

I’m not sure if it’s the lack of common courtesy or just plain ignorance that causes people to leave their trash behind, but I sure am grateful that I’m one of those who doesn’t practice this behavior. I have to thank my family for teaching me good values such as this one. They always taught me to put myself in the shoes of those people who end up having to clean up the trash left behind in those public places like a movie theater. That led me to thinking about how frustrated I would be if I was having to do that job and it’s become a great motivating force for me to consistently pick up my own trash no matter where I am now.

Sadly, it’s not just at the movie theaters I see this behavior happening either. It’s in the parking lots outside convenience stores where people are leaving their empty bottles, cigarette packs, and old scratch tickets on the ground. It’s in the fast food establishments where people are leaving their trays, dirty napkins, and wrappers behind on the tables. It’s in the public washrooms where people are leaving their used paper hand towels on the bathroom floors. And it’s even in the recovery meetings I attend where I see people leaving behind their empty drink bottles and coffee cups on the floors below their seats.

Why do so many people do this? I truly wish I had the answer. The only thing I know I can keep doing to deal with this problem is to continue taking the action to clean up after myself. So no matter where I am, I always make sure to take my trash to the nearest receptacle. Often, I even pick up other’s people trash left behind and discard it as well. It really isn’t that hard to take an extra second or two to discard our trash, and someone else’s for that matter, in a nearby bin. Thinking someone else is being paid to do that job is definitely lacking in common courtesy and isn’t it really just being plain ignorant in doing so?

The next time you find yourself about to leave your trash behind in any public place, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and try to picture yourself having to clean up your mess and everyone else’s too. Hopefully now you might reconsider doing this action ever again and instead start having the common courtesy to throw away your waste like those of us who do…

Peace, Love, Light, and Joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

“Perseverance” – A Message From God Or A Coincidence?

I have never heard God speak directly to me, at least not that I’ve ever been aware of. Nor have I ever seen any angels, spirits, or ghosts during my life…yet. I have also never received any irrefutable proof that anything exists beyond this plane. While I have seen many television shows, read many books, and heard of many phenomena that say otherwise, to this day I’m still waiting for something to happen to me in such a direct way where my brain will never be able to refute the existence of God ever again.

There are some things though that have happened to me, which may not necessarily be classified as otherworldly, where I’ve been wondering if they are the way the spiritual realm is choosing to communicate with me at this time. One of those very things occurred just a few days ago when I was in New York City with my closest friend for our annual Christmas holiday trip there. Let me first say that I was questionable on whether I was even going to go this year because of the level of physical pain I’ve been enduring as of late. For days leading up to it, I prayed to God asking if I was supposed to go or not, but I never got any answer. I decided that the absence of getting one was that I had to make the decision all on my own. So I ended up choosing to go, even in the midst of having great physical pain.

When the day arrived and I found myself walking the streets of New York City with my friend, I was really struggling being present at times with the things we were doing. My body was hurting immensely with each step I took and I was having to pray quite a bit in my head for the strength to make it through the entire day. I began wondering how much more I was going to be able to take of the physical pain being a part of my life and at a certain point, I hurt so much that I couldn’t go on with the site seeing. I asked my friend if he was opened to going to St. Patricks Cathedral to have a prolonged rest period there because of it. Normally I’d do this anyway during my visits in previous years, but in those they always were brief just to take a few snapshots and say a quick prayer. This time around though we decided to spend a good hour resting in the pews until the final worship service of the day started. When it began, I was so exhausted from the pain that my eyes kept closing. That all changed though when the priest’s sermon began. It was then that I felt somehow God might be trying to communicate to me through the sermon, which was about one thing…perseverance.

By definition, perseverance is defined as having a steadfastness in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. When the priest started talking about this by sharing a story about a saint who endured great pain and never lost their faith, my heart began to stir. The length of time that I have endured great physical pain with no answers and little relief has had me often wanting to just give up and pack it in for good. And to be totally honest, I’ve questioned a lot lately whether God even exists because of it. But even in the midst of all that, I have prayed diligently every single day for answers and relief, but they’ve never come in the way my brain has hoped for. Instead, I have wondered if they’ve been arriving indirectly in ways like this priest’s sermon. The thought of that overwhelmed me so much in my pew that I began to cry.

Having perseverance is not an easy thing to do especially when so much physical pain is involved. And I know my ego has truly been hoping for a more direct answer from God, such as a big booming voice coming out of thin air where only I can hear it and where I’m enveloped in a warm brilliant white light. But that hasn’t happened, nor did it happen in that cathedral. Instead what did happen was that I heard a message that told me to continue to persevere in my quest to heal and not lose my faith that God will get me there.

Holding steadfast in this belief in the absence of receiving any direct signs indicating so is probably the biggest challenge I’ve ever undertaken in this lifetime. So many have said I should just give up and seek a prescription of some type of narcotic to numb the pain. Others have tempted to lure me back into addictions to deal with it. But so far, I’ve resisted both of these and instead have stayed on course choosing to believe in something I still don’t know if it even exists.

So was all of it just a coincidence that I was at a church service that day where the sermon’s message was about perseverance? Was my being there all arranged by some Guiding Force that is working beyond my perception of things? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but what I do know is that I was there and I did hear something that stirred my heart and soul that day.

I often wonder if God doesn’t talk to us directly because the answers might not ever satisfy our egos. Maybe things have to happen indirectly to us, like being led to hear that sermon’s message, because that’s how we’re wired. Regardless of what the truth really is, that sermon made me realize I still had two choices in front of me…Persevere with blind faith that God won’t leave me in this dark place, or give up and go back to medications, drugs, and addictions to try to numb my pain.

I decided that the best choice for me was to continue to persevere for one reason and one reason only. Deep down the thing I want most in life is to make it through this and know that God was always there guiding me through it all.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson

My New York Christmas Story – Part II

Do you ever relive any of your good childhood memories?

I do and I’ve found it to be very therapeutic, especially given that I had such a dysfunctional family growing up. Coming from a dysfunctional family always made it very easy to talk negatively about the experiences I had growing up. And for awhile that’s all I did. But I found that was holding me back from healing and growing spiritually. When I started realizing that, I began doing work to reshape my thoughts of my childhood to a more positive level. It wasn’t an easy process given the fact that I had so much suppressed anger inside about what I went through back then. But the more I worked through and released those things, the more I began to remember moments from my childhood that I truly cherished. I wrote specifically about one of those yesterday when I spoke about my family’s annual day trip to New York City during the Christmas holiday season. Remembering good memories like this was only part of the healing process I went through to reshape the thoughts of my childhood. The other part was in taking an action to relive them in the present. And since 2007, I’ve been doing just that by going to New York City during the Christmas holiday season on or around the second Saturday of each December.

I’m quite sure I wasn’t fully conscious of the healing that was taking place inside of me that first year I went back down to New York City in December. But I was definitely conscious of a constant urging coming from somewhere within me to get me to actually do it again. It started with me asking my closest friend if he was interested in going and it turned into us asking a few other friends to join us as well. When the second Saturday arrived in December of 2007, I had a car full of people heading with me to the train station in New Haven, CT at five in the morning. Over the next 14 hours or so, my friends allowed me to guide them along the same exact path I had taken with my family almost twenty years earlier. By the time we were back in my car heading home late in the evening, all of our faces hurt from laughing so hard because of the amazing experience we had with each other. But what I felt inside was even more special than that and it was the same sense of joy I had in reliving a happy childhood memory.

For seven years now, I have visited New York City around the second Saturday of each December solely to relive one of the fondest memories I have from my childhood. While some of those outings have been more fun than others, I have always been able to remember my family with positive thoughts during each. Things have changed over the years in each of those outings including the people who went with me, the activities we did there, and the destinations we had during the day. But one thing has never changed with these trips and that’s the fact that I’m still doing them, like I did last Friday.

My honest truth is that I don’t feel anger anymore about my family and I know reliving my happy childhood memories, like our Christmas trip to New York City, is a big reason for that. It’s helped me to shift my focus completely away from the negative thoughts and experiences I had back then. Now, I’m able to reflect so much easier on the good things that actually did happen with us during my childhood, as there were actually many of them.

I know how difficult this task may seem if I was to ask you to recollect your happy memories from childhood, especially if you grew up in a dysfunctional family like I did. But I want you to know that it’s not only possible to recollect them, it’s also possible to completely heal from all the bad ones too.

My healing began with God guiding me to forgive my family and let go of all that anger. And the more that I forgave my family and let go of all that anger, the more those happy memories of them started trickling in. And the more those happy memories of them starting trickling in, the more I had urgings to relive those memories in the present. And the more that I have relived those memories in the present, like my annual outing to New York City during the holiday season, the more I’ve realized how God has guided me to reshape my thoughts of my family to that of the positive.

So please know if you are finding it difficult to recollect any happy memories from your own childhood, all it may take for them to surface is a little bit of forgiveness and the letting go of some anger. In doing so, I’m sure that some of them will begin trickling in and when they do, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and start reliving them as best as you can in the present. As the more you do just that, the more I’m sure you’ll find your own thoughts being reshaped of your family to that of the positive too.

Peace, love, light, and joy,

Andrew Arthur Dawson