Seth Godin has published an extraordinary piece of work (he’s done that a few times before) it’s called ‘The Carbon Almanac’ and you can find it here.
He’s worked for two years on this with over 300 people worldwide of different areas of expertise to provide an objective assessment of the climate crisis and things that we can do about it.
I’m trying to read this slowly and carefully so that I am informed moving forwards about my own decision making and how I can discuss this with others but clearly once you’re confronted with what’s going on, it’s devastating and terrible.
One of the most extraordinary things though early on in the book is the 4-page discussion on convenience as a driver for capitalism and climate change.
Over the past 15-20 years or slightly longer, we have just lapsed into the habit of fixing everything now regardless of the cost to the planet and the environment.
If it breaks, we order it off amazon, we never try to fix it.
If we have to walk 4 feet, then we don’t and we get someone else or some machine to do it.
If it takes more than 15 minutes, we can buy a thing that will do it a little bit faster and slowly and slowly we lose all the joy in anything.
Ages ago, I read some stuff from a guy who did the Buddhist bootcamp and one of the things he talked about is preparation of food.
I’m thinking back to when we were away in France on the bikes and Alex made the extraordinary Team Sky rice cakes, savoury and sweet and then we spent an evening wrapping them the way we’re supposed to wrap them if we were Team Sky.
I was rubbish at it and Alex was brilliant but as we practised it, I got better, and I remember later on that week passing somebody’s rice cakes to people we were riding with (they needed using up) and they were astonished at what we’d done.
The joy of preparing that and wrapping them and carrying them and giving them to other people was just amazing but it was f@ck*ng inconvenient.
It’s much easier to buy a packet of gels or flapjacks and putting them in your pocket but it’s actually worse for you and certainly worse for your mental health.
We risk reaching a situation where all we ever do is rearrange tasks and rearrange time and never actually create or achieve anything.
I’m lucky that over the past 6 weeks I’ve managed to get myself into a routine of health and selfcare which is much better than it’s been since 2018.
One of the things I do any of the days I’m cycling first thing in the morning (which at the moment could be 4 or 5 days a week) is to prepare my breakfast the night before.
That is just porridge oats and blueberry’s and raspberry’s or strawberry’s and milk and honey.
Soaks overnight and is ready when I downstairs at 6.15am to have with my old man collection of tablets and a coffee and then walk the dogs.
I was thinking as I made it the other night as I very carefully cut up the strawberries and took a minimal amount of the green bit off the end to make sure that the maximum amount of strawberry went into my bowl (because I’m always starving at the moment) of what a joy it was to prepare your breakfast the night before.
I could just pick a bar of dairy milk out the fridge and have half of it for the same calories but that wouldn’t be quite the same would it?
It’s inconvenient to fix your breakfast the night before when you’d rather be watching Netflix but drip, drip, bit by bit adding these inconveniences into your life adds joy into your life and also helps to protect the planet from overconsumption.
Blog Post Number - 3158
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