Giving up and Giving Away

According to the Chinese horoscope where all people are slotted into 12 animal signs according to the year of birth – I am a rat. For years I blamed my love for hoarding – usually of pretty useless things – to my rat-tish nature.

Five years ago, deciding to challenge nature and also go green, I first started with giving away. Two times a year, I would go through every single item of clothing, shoes, bags, stationery, toys, gift items, etc, etc. and start sorting to give away. I created some thumb rules – if something has not been used for a year, then most likely it is not that essential and can be given away. If I have newer clothes, then the older ones must go – however much attached I am to it, however many the memories associated and even if it is the newest of things and not even been used! It was not easy at first, but with time it has got easier. It definitely helps that we live on campus inside our NGO and a lot of people working on the campus come from neighbouring villages. Someone or the other would need the items I put up and they help themselves to whatever they need.

Giving away I find, has helped me grow spiritually. It has decreased my attachment to material things and increased my joy of sharing. Recently, I emptied out my kitchen of over 50% of big utensils, small utensils, boxes and more boxes, bottles, etc. It is just amazing how many dabbas (small plastic containers) that we Indians obsessively collect. Thankfully, we don’t have Swiggy and Food Panda delivering food to us in our village or I would have had to vacate the house to allow the plastic containers to live in it! Not surprisingly, I am cooking quite well with the reduced number of utensils and the ease of managing a leaner kitchen is making me think I really need to give more away!

I am not sure how folks living in cities manage? With constant access to malls and attractive shops selling things you don’t essentially need, how do you keep away from buying?! For us, once-city people now living in villages – Amazon and Flipkart with its big bargains is retail therapy at its worst. These sites are constantly at your smart-phone addicted finger-tips and through pop-ups, it dangles tantalizing offers of things you might have even ever searched for. So, I sometimes binge e-shopping and 75% of the time, I end up ordering things I don’t really require. Ordering is easy but the green-guilt comes when the 10 inches by 8 inches something-you-ordered comes wrapped in layers of bubble packing protected on all sides by those air-filled sealed plastic bags and then put in 20 inches by 30 carton box! The tipping point was when I received a teeny-weeny SD card I ordered in some monstrous packaging like this.

So, the next journey has been a journey of giving up.
Starting with deleting every e-shopping app there is from my phone, I started keeping a record and limit the number of items I allow myself to order in a month. Past two years, I have started gifting myself single e-buying free months! This time I am extending my e-buying free experiment to two continuous months. The temptation is there but is forcing me to delay pandering to what is largely my greed and not my need!

And so the plastic-free journey continues.

Read Part 1 of Jennifer’s Plastic-free Journey here.

About The Author:
Jennifer/ Jenny is a development professional working with the ant, an NGO working for the development of villages based in Chirang district of Bodoland, around 200 km from Guwahati, the capital of Assam. Her current plastic footprint is 11.4 kilos per year from which only 1.5 kilos are single-use products.

Visit: theant.org to know more about Jenny’s work.