Sustainable Living Rule #1: Be Gentle To Yourself
My friend Nick listens thoughtfully as I tell my sob story.
“The film is too stressful,” I say. “I am always running around. I am never able to be where I want to be.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not very sustainable, Caroline.”
I look at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?” I say.
“I mean, for you.”
I gazed at him. How irrelevant!, I thought, but the thought quickly passed. He’s right. How can I expect others to join me in an environmentally-sustainable revolution… if even I’m not having any fun doing it?
This is the story I want to pass along. This is what I want people to learn from my three-month sustainable living experiment. I’m more at peace now, knowing that teaching others exactly how to live more sustainably themselves is a secondary goal. Rather, I’m interested in conveying even more valuable knowledge than that: what I went through while trying to maintain this lifestyle.
I learned that I need to be gentle to myself. I learned that in order to love Mother Nature, you must love the most intimate manifestation of her you will ever know: yourself.
