We Are the Plastic Garbage Bags

Today, I saw a plastic garbage bag with a hole in it, and I came to this realization: that plastic garbage bag will never not have a hole in it for me.

Whoever put that hole there will remember the bag before the hole, along with the story that brought the hole. It will always be the bag that was once intact, somehow got a hole, and now is a plastic garbage bag that has a hole in it brought about by a certain set of circumstances.

I think that applies to people, too: so often, we see the bag after the hole has been inflicted, and we neglect to recognize the pre-hole bag or the story that put the hole there. So many people in our lives are only and will only ever be plastic garbage bags with holes in them.

Of course, we can never know most of the stories that put the holes there. It will never come up in the course of a regular conversation that "Well, it got caught on a hanger as I was picking it up to put in the car to go back to school after spring break" or "Those force-flex triangles don't do squat--the board game I was donating to GoodWill that day ripped right through" or anything else. We'll never get to experience that person's spring break, or know what that hanger was holding, or hear the laughter as a group of friends played that board game, or know exactly what else was in that GoodWill bag.

All these tiny, insignificant things... they make up the very core of who we are.

Tiny things can have as much influence over us as huge things.

I often find myself wondering which tiny things matter and which ones don't. As an example, I propose a scenario:

One afternoon, you get your mail. You bring it up to your dorm room and toss it to your desk. The next morning, you are in a hurry to get to class and throw on the first pair of earrings you see on your desk and hurry off to take that dang exam. Your day progresses; billions of other tiny things happen, each contributing in its own way to your eventual destiny.

Alternately...

One afternoon, you take an extra five minutes at dinner with a friend and are in too much of a hurry to grab your mail on your way up to your room. The next morning, you are running late for class, but you see that your favorite earrings are sitting right there on your desk (where you *would* have thrown your mail and covered them if you hadn't been in a hurry last night), so you grab them and put them on as you speed-walk to class.
Once you get to class, one of your classmates remarks on how cool your earrings are. Since they're your favorite, you thank your classmate and leave class with a smile.
That smile catches the eye of a guy you've talked to a couple of times but never really gotten to know; he comes over to say hi, you two hit it off, Happily Ever After.


Every tiny event in each of our days has the potential to create endless possibilities for the rest of our lives.

The next time you are in too much of a hurry to get your mail, or smile broadly, or share a kind word, or walk a little quicker than you might normally, or walk at your normal pace, or share a thought you wouldn't regularly share, or keep that thought to yourself... remember that every single infinitesimal fraction of an instant is its own infinite world of possibility.

These are the holes, and we are the plastic garbage bags.

Reviews

[ShalimarBonet]

I really like the abstract nature of this piece and it's actually very beautiful and true.
The only thing I'd have to give advice on is repeating the "hole in plastic bags" portion because we know that's the picture you are trying to paint