Something Uplifting

I know that I can be kind of a downer...So I think it is time for motivational story time. (P.S. I am not making this up and/or exaggerating anything--this really did happen.)

Last year I was repelling down waterfalls in the Mexican jungle with the Club Alpino from UDLAP. Since there were a limited number of ropes to repel, we went one at a time and waited for the rest of the group. On the first route, I was one of the first to go, so I had a while to wait.

One of the people I was with was my great friend, Lili, a self-proclaimed environmentalist, vegetarian, yoga-loving Australian...you get the picture. Anyways, we were sitting by a stream, resting and commenting on the beautiful day. A little ways down there were some big boulders with trash on top, left from previous hikers. Well, Lili climbed up there (which was was more challenging than it sounds), put as many empty bottles and trash as she could fit in a plasic bag, and then tied that to her backpack.

When she climbed back down I just rolled my eyes. "Come on Lili, seriously? Did you really just climb up there to get a few bottles? You're gonna hike for the rest of the day with a plastic bag full of bottles hanging off your back? Plus, there is trash still up there, its not like those bottles made much of a difference anyways."

Well, she looked at me and said, "Yeah I am going to, because if another person comes along and does the same thing, and then another person...eventually they will all be gone and it was be beautiful again"

At the time, I said she had too much faith in humanity.

Now that I look back, I realize she's brilliant. We can't necessarily rely on someone else to make a change--we have climb up and do our small part that we are able to do. However, we can't NOT assume that someone else won't do the same thing. We are all in this together and we can make it happen together as well. That's what it's all about--a collaborative movement. We have to have more faith in humanity, but we also have to have faith in ourselves.

And, I did begin to change my own attitude, in other words, I learned my lesson. A few months later, I was walking along the Oaxacan coast with another friend of ours, Mirte, and I started to collect the trash as we came across it. Then I turned to Mirte and said, "Lili would be so proud of us."