The Story of Stuff
As I sat amidst a pile of presents waiting to be wrapped yesterday I slid into a spell of sadness over the amount of "stuff" that gets accumulated at Christmas.
Sure we'll recycle our wrapping and I love to give gifts to my family and friends but I always have a twinge of discomfort at the wastefulness of it all. Annie Leonard has made a movie called The Story of Stuff that looks at the impact our accumulation and disposal lifestyle has on our world.
What if I'm Too Tense to Relax?
Q: From a Living by Design Reader: “I’m stressed and I know I would benefit from relaxation, but I feel too tense to start. Whenever I try and slow down, things seem too slow and I feel frustrated that I could be getting things done rather than sitting “doing nothing”. How can I find a way to try relaxation and get used to the feeling?”When you’re busy and getting lots done it feels as if you are moving fast, like when you’re driving on a motorway, you are covering distance at speed, when you take an exit and have to slow your speed down, it feels really slow in comparison to the pace you where travelling at just seconds ago.
For many busy people, relaxation feels the same way. Rather than settling into the pleasure and calm of a contemplative state, they find it too slow, or too alien to their usual state of productivity and drive.
Are You Suffering from Toxic Overload?
Author Pat Thomas (who also writes for The Ecologist Online) has just released a fascinating, if slightly disturbing, book called What’s in this Stuff? - The Essential Guide to What's Really in the Products You Buy in the Supermarket which highlights the toxic nasties that lurk within our food.
One of Pat's top concerns is meat. If you eat meat, you also eat what the animal ate before it was slaughtered, and that can apparently include: processed feathers, chicken poo and bone meal - fed to animals as acceptable forms of protein to help the animal gain weight quickly.
Other hidden ingredients might include plastic pellets, a cheap source of roughage, anti-biotics and growth promoting chemicals.
Precious Little Chunks of Time
"You can do so much in ten minutes time. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into ten minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity."
Sage advice from the man who bought us the Bratnok and founded the warehouses where so many have totally lost it and dissolved into expletive uttering wrecks, while franticly cramming glassware and cutlery into giant paper bags.
But my IKEA traumas aside - Mr Kamprad makes a very valuable point. Often we shy away from doing things we know will benefit us greatly because we feel they require time we can’t spare. So we sit and mull over it and do nothing for a few minutes instead!