/ Environment

Links to Make You More Betterer

My name’s Chris Jeavans. For one month I am attempting to live my normal life with one main change – no new plastic. That means no bags, no packaging, no plastic to hang around in landfill. In this blog I’ll keep you updated to let you know how I’m getting on.

[From BBC NEWS | Month without plastic ]

A seemingly simple proposition, but considering the amount of plastics in nearly everything we buy, it is much harder than simply cutting out the plastic bags and water bottles. Even if you don’t every try to duplicate Chris’s efforts, it will help you become more mindful of just how insidious plastic is these days, and just how much of it is filling up our landfills and just sitting there, decomposing at a ridiculously slow rate. A great gift to further generations: here you go kiddies, inherit a world full of plastic rubbish!

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Rowing solo across oceans might not be everybody’s idea of a dream job, but Roz Savage decided she’d had enough of her conventional London existence and wanted to do something special with her life. So in her mid-thirties she quit her job and bought a rowboat.

She now uses her adventures to raise awareness of environmental issues and inspire others to rise to their own challenges – no matter how big or daunting those challenges may seem.

[From The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker]

Reading Roz’s blog, listening to her podcasts with Leo Laporte, you quickly realize that doing amazing things takes far more focus, humility, and passion than it does courage. Check out her site and read about this amazing journey. I guarantee that Roz will share some thoughts that will be directly applicable to your own journey, whether that journey is artistic, domestic, or adventurous.

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We improve for the sake of improving that somewhere, at some distant point down the beaten road we’ll find happiness.

All the while we’re chasing happiness, we don’t realize the fatal, vicious circle we place ourselves in. We’ve habituated ourselves into placing our happiness in the future. We’ve conditioned ourselves into allowing happiness after some level of achievement, that never comes.

[From Finding Bliss: How to Reverse Engineer Happiness | PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement]

No easy answers, but this short column raises some interesting points, especially about our minds having evolved to be far more concerned with survival than happiness. Also, let’s just say your humble host here at LtL recognizes that this is one of his biggest challenges. So, when Yoda assessed Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, I recognized, even when I was eleven or twelve, that I shared this trait:

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.

Lately I’ve been using the term “mindful” a lot. I think in part as a way to try to remind myself that I should be paying more attention to my heres and my nows; that I should not take events and people and life for granted. Also, to be simply more aware of my environment and my actions. I also believe that for a great number of people, happiness is a scary proposition. We feel that we wouldn’t be ourselves, we wouldn’t know how to cope, we wouldn’t be interesting if we were happy. Grooves in the brain that keep us, like a damaged record, repeating the same three notes over and over and over and over again until something or someone comes along and pushes, gently, the needle from the groove and we can then go on to play our whole song, not some small portion of it.

On this day..