Every Little Bit Helps

I don't know if you follow the news, but the world is pretty scary right now.

I could be referring to any of a dozen things. Right now I'm talking about climate change. It's terrifying. The world we leave to our kids will be unrecognizable from the one we inherited. And it's so easy to point fingers. It's so easy to talk and talk about all these huge changes we need to make. It's so easy to get paralyzed into inaction because nothing will ever be enough so why do anything at all?

Because if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.

And yeah, I'm still drawing inspiration from that quote.

There's this thing that pops up again and again that most of the pollution is caused by 100 companies or some bullshit. If those 100 companies disappeared tomorrow, our lives would be drastically different. We are all complicit in this.

But the world is big and complicated and it's impossible to be perfectly morally virtuous with a carbon footprint of zero. So why even try.

Because every little bit helps. Every small change leads to a bigger change.

Anyway, this is the year of small changes for me. Things that are sustainable. Things that maybe don't have a huge impact but that will build over time. Things that will hopefully make it a little less jarring when we are eventually forced to make big changes.

I've replaced all the soap in my house with bar soap. And I'm going to switch to bar shampoo and bar condition and probably bar lotion, too. A little less plastic. We'll never get rid of plastic entirely - if you spend any time in a hospital you'll understand how many lives plastic saves. But we can and should cut back.

I'm eating less meat. This was easier than I expected. When Kevin was alive, we had meat with nearly every meal. I ate beef at least once a week. After he died, beef became more of a treat, something I'd eat once a month if that. I accidentally went three days without eating any meat at all, and that's when I became more deliberate about it. I started looking up more vegetarian recipes. I recently embraced "plant-based meats". I'm still going to eat filet mignon on my birthday for as long as I possibly can. But I can certainly balance that out with meatless Mondays.

I'm on the lookout for other small changes I can make, too. Things that are easy to do. Things that will eventually become second nature so that I can start embracing other changes.

It's so easy to feel helpless in this big, bad world. All you can do is control what you can. And try to do a bit better every day. Just a bit though. It's gotta be sustainable and something you can build on.