Stay Tuned to Your Eco Behaviour

Written by: Marc Lehmann
August 4, 2008

Do you think about everything little action you take during your day? The Buddhists often refer to making your daily trivial activities into a meditation. The idea is that you can break yourself away from that automaton behaviour of bad little habits and turn them into good ones, both mental and physical.

Making sure your habitual life is sustainable requires a tuning in to your daily habits. Do you keep all the lights switched off during the day? Do you refuse that plastic bag when you are buying one item from the shop?

Is your mind tuned to Sustainable FM? Before you buy that car make the decision to put much more emphasis on it’s fuel consumption statistics. Before you order those nice looking river pebbles for your landscaping ask where they have come from. The man-made ones look exactly like the ones taken from mother nature and the price difference is small. This is a shift in thinking, a re-tuning of your mind to a sustainable one. This is smart sustainable thinking rather than habitual thinking.

The irony of sustainability is that it is so easy and so hard at the same time. Most of us are armed with more than enough knowledge to become sustainable but doing it is another thing. We all know how to lose weight - eat less and exercise more, but we don’t do it. Getting green is much the same as getting fit.

Many of us are becoming more sustainable, but is ‘more’ enough? Do we have the time to be slow changers? I’ve been a little slow at change I must admit. Breaking old habits takes time. Despite some good decisions and changes I have much more work to do before claiming to live a sustainable life. Most of that work is mental, from which the physical changes will follow. It’s about prioritising sustainable activities ahead of other things in life.

It is also about becoming brain fit when it comes to sustainable thinking. Making the right choices in the moment, at the point of sale. The right decisions such as deciding to walk or drive to the local shops, to buy the free range eggs or the cage ones. Lots of seemingly little decisions have huge knockon effects when accumulated over decades of behaviour and consumption.

Tuning in every day to your Sustainable FM station will help you create good habits.

Marc Lehmann is one of the founders of Saasu.com and is committed advocate of sustainable business practices and lifestyles | http://www.thecalmspace.com/about#marc

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