Letting Go

This is a photo of a point in Oregon.  I remember that day...the truck was full of somebody else's garbage.  I had gone to the dump, but found it was closed.  I was really wanting to take a day for myself that day (how typical!  Some time off, and there I was hauling around bags of smelly garbage...and they belonged to someone else to boot.  At least the majority of it.)  Sometimes when we get beat up in life, we end up hauling around someone else's stuff.  It wasn't our making.  We had very little to do with the way it got thrown into the back of our old truck, but there it is.  Now we could throw it off onto the side of the road where someone else will have to deal with it, and then we become culpable in the whole matter of someone else getting their hands dirty with that garbage.  Or we can go around carrying someone else's garbage, and having it stink to high heaven.  Or we can get it to the dump.  If the dump is closed that day, I would suggest that you not ride around with that stinky load.  Just go back home until you can drop it off.  I am speaking from experience.  Dozens of tourists watching the seals below, just don't appreciate stinky garbage on their days off.  It doesn't matter if it's your only day to do this for months.  They just don't like it!  You get dirty looks, and then pretty soon you feel as though you're covered with garbage, and more bags get piled up in the back of your truck.  That's thing that happens when you carry around garbage.  That old stinking stuff attracts more stinking stuff.  Figure out how you can get it to the dump.  Figure out how you can let it go.  Then go home and clean out the back of the truck.  Clean it until it shines.  And then to heck with it all, take your day at the beach!  Go watch the seals.  Listen to them and you will really hear them...instead of having the stench of that garbage floating around you, mixing with that experience and taking away some of the joy of it.  And believe me, you want to feel the joy of all those hundreds of seals calling to each other with the roar of the surf in the background.  There's nothing else like it in the world.  It will make you laugh and cry at the same time. 

Don't let anyone steal one more moment of this precious life.  You deserve to live it fully.