I was at a coffee shop and they asked if I wanted my drink for here or to go. I thought for a second and figured I have the time to sit and sip, so I might as well take my drink for here and save the paper cup. The truth is, I have been thinking a lot about how much I waste lately; it’s kinda hard not to when every other story in the news is about how we humans are destroying our environment, changing the climate and dooming the planet.

I think about all the to go cups I take, the shopping bags, the times I print 2 copies of something when I could really get by with just 1, the uncessary car and plane trips.  Suddenly, I am sensitized, I see a glimmer of my culpability in waste and destruction of the environment. I see consequences. What amazes me the most is that before, I didn’t see. I would just use something, throw it away and think it was gone.

This morning I was reading the news and there was a story of a Canadian company that shipped it’s trash to the Philippines and just left it in massive containers on the dock. I was incredulous, so angry at the company, what the hell were they thinking? Like trash is just gone, stops being a problem, when it leaves Canadian shores. But actually I totally understand what they were thinking: It is the hidden thought buried in my brain every time I throw away my coffee cup —  “it’s done because it is not my problem anymore”.

For the last few weeks I have been doing a little exercise, collecting evidence of the times that I have been ridiculously self centered, when I have been totally blinded by the lie I tell myself that this world revolves around me. Here I have the biggest, ugliest, example yet — when it’s not my problem it is not a problem. But the thing is, there are still consequences. And even if the consequences don’t effect me now, it doesn’t mean it won’t be my problem in the future, i.e. climate change.

Being blind to consequences is a real issue for me. I feel like unless I have my hand on the stove and immediately get burned I somehow lose sight of the fact that consequences, i.e. causes and effect, are real. That My Friends is the reason my sun loving self recently had to get a painful skin cancer treatment. It is why I am struggling  on a diet now as a result of all those sweets I just couldn’t pass up before. It is why I keep saying yes to planning events for a troublsom work client and the night of each event keeps being a shit show I regret signing up for. Even though these examples are much more clearly “my problem” than say a tossed coffee cup, there is a common thread; the moment I sit down to eat cake I think only about today’s Alana, it is like tommorrow’s Alana’s problems are not my own. Or like somehow, I am a special fucking unicorn who will escape the consequences of my actions because, well, I’m so damn special. Or like maybe because impermanence is real, I can escape consequence. But the truth is impermanence only promises that I can’t be sure of what exact consequences will be, and when they will arise, not that there may not be any at all. Afterall, every cause has an effect.

This all brings me back to my trash because, for me, it so clearly illustrates the danger of being so self centered — I have literally been helping to destroy the planet, my home, with my own two hands. Sure I can say I didn’t know any better, I didn’t see, so I am not culpable. But the truth is climate change, global destruction, consequence in general, really isn’t about culpability, its not moralistic, it doesn’t hinge notions of ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’, its just the effects that arise when the causes are ripe. And somehow, this example makes it so  so clear to me that the most destructive root cause in the world is ignorance. Because I see just a little of the world through my particular window, because I see the cup go in the trash and the trash emptied from my own bin, because I only see my today and not tomorrow, I just keep sowing the seeds for consequences that yeild big ole’ fields of suffering.

A long time ago I asked Mae Yo to tell me what the relationship between suffering and impermanence was. The truth is, I am still trying to process her answer*. But at least now I think I have one aspect of an answer of my own as well:

 Like everything else, karma, i.e. cause and effect, is subject to suffering and immpermance. Cause and effect is just the continual process of arising and ceasing (i.e. impermanence). Everything arises when the causes of its arising come together and everything ends when the causes of its cessation come together. I get a big ole dose of suffering every time I am oblivious to the workings of cause and effect, when I expect and desire it to go diffrently than it does. Each time I ignore the fat  ass that can come with too much cake and the skin cancer that can come with too much sun. Each time I let my self-centerdness lull me into the belief that I am special, that only ‘my problems’ matter, that this world is here for me to be everything I want and need it to be, I am sowing the seeds for a very rude awakening when duh — that isn’t actually how things turn out to be.

*Mae Yo’s answer: Suffering comes from something stopping…it’s anything that you need to tolerate. Impermanence is continuous movement, not stopping. Suffering is like you want it to stop but it moves. It’s putting a stick in the water and causing ripples.