Just a few days ago, my wife and I decided to go to our favorite fast-food restaurant for some quick snacks. As she lined up (it was a long line) to place our orders, I scanned the place around for an available table. I spotted an empty table but it was strewn with assorted food leavings: plastic cups, some half-filled with drinks as well as plates with plastic utensils and left-over food scraps, rice and opened sauce sachets. It was a disgusting sight. I told another waiting customer go ahead and take it. I decided to wait for a cleaned up table or I would just lose my appetite.
For crying out loud, when will we learn to clean up our own mess! We eat our food in public places and leave our waste behind and casually go our way. Organizers and participants of a political sortie or pop concert never bother to clean up all the litter after the event. I once saw a garbage truck spilling out its collected trash on the street not bothering to stop and retrieve it.
In some countries, when you eat in a food hub, you are expected to return the tray at the counter, separate the rubbish, and throw it in the garbage bin—no need for the service crew to clean up when you leave.
The policy is called Clean As You Go or simply CLAYGO. I’ve seen it practiced in Los Angeles and San Diego when my wife and I went for a three-week visit to relatives in 2019. My daughter who visited Tokyo that same year told me that it is also the practice in Japanese restaurants. In fact, she observed that there were hardly any trash bins in Tokyo. Japanese residents are expected to carry a bag to put wrappers, bottles, or other trash accumulated while they’re out.
Everyone should practice CLAYGO, not just when eating in fast food outlets or food stalls but in every public place. CLAYGO means that cleanliness is everyone’s business. It’s all about table manners and discipline, and it must start at home.
More than being obsessed with cleanliness, this practice is our little way of showing how we care for our environment. Instead of relying entirely on street sweepers or city cleaners, we should at least make an effort to clean up our own mess. Just to give you an idea: MMDA collects a total of 32 truckloads of trash and flotsam every day from our waterways across Metro Manila.
Practicing CLAYGO in our daily life speaks a lot about you. It tells me about your values and your character. I see it not as a cleanliness practice or a policy in a place but as an attitude that is rooted in values and virtues, which are already inherent in the Filipino cultural DNA.
Bulagsak. Balahura. Nakakadiri. With so many ways to express our indignation and revulsion in the native language, it only shows that our society looks at leaving our mess for others to clean up as distasteful behavior or action.
There is a word that I now seldom hear but which I think must be brought back to mainstream consciousness because it is the essence of CLAYGO.
The term is konsiderasyon, a traditional virtue that is rooted in respect for others. If someone after you will come and have to clean up your mess, you are being disrespectful. You simply ignore what the other person will have to do with your mess and what he now thinks of you.
“Mahiya ka naman,” as old folks would say. Have a little shame. “Hiya” is a value that is said to guide and govern much of the behavior of the Filipino. It is the enforcing value behind konsiderasyon, together with pakikisama and paggalang sa kapwa, which are both essential Filipino values.
Invoking these inherent values is one way to ease our people into taking more responsibility for our respective messes. It cultivates self-discipline and orderliness and sense of responsibility.
But the practice won’t catch on that easily even if we put all kinds of CLAYGO signs in public eating places and even impose fines. It reminds me of Wang Yangming, a famous Confucian scholar of the Ming Dynasty who said: “To catch the bandit in the hills is easy; to arrest the thief in ourselves is tough.”
That’s because while CLAYGO seems like a simple task, it needs to be cultivated in us, which may take a lifetime, and the earlier it is cultivated the better. The practice must be so deeply rooted within us that it becomes automatic, unbidden and reflexive, and is then applied in the other aspects of our lives. It becomes a way of life.
Just like in Japan, where CLAYGO is inculcated as early as in primary school. As mature adults, the Japanese observe the so-called 5S principles in their workplaces, designed to promote cleanliness and orderliness to increase productivity.
In a traditional town fiesta, as invited guests, we take turns at the table and show our respect to the host and other guests by not only restraining ourselves from emptying the plates of food but by helping prepare a clean table for the next batch who will be taking part in the feast of life.
I pity the coming generations of Filipinos who are yet to mature. They will need to clean up the messes our generation and present set of leaders will be leaving behind.
This is why it is urgent that the CLAYGO attitude and approach must be fostered among our incoming government leaders and public servants with respect to governance.
On a more personal level, it’s also time for us seniors who are in our 70s and 80s to clean up our own messes before making our final exit. Let’s settle our debts—financial, legal, relational or moral.
This is our last chance to piece together unresolved stories and make sense of troubled relationships, the losses and griefs of our individual lives. Let’s bring whatever secrets we have been harboring out into the open for proper resolution and closure.
It is also time to sort through the rubbish and treasures and the extraordinary amount of stuff we have hoarded all these years. Let’s de-clutter and give it all away—or most of it anyway.
In the same way that old misplaced or buried photographs may emerge from the clutter as you sort it out, who knows, doing a reflective self-cleansing might even bring out someone you have never really known or understood in life: the person you really are.