2010 will come to an end tonight and another new year will be upon us. I am not one for "New Year's Resolutions" since they rarely seem to work and they are generally pretty self-centered, but I have some New Year's considerations that I am going to try to focus on, and which I decided I would share here. So, in no particular order, here are my five modest focus points for 2011:
1. Conservation: It may seem like a small thing to do, but I remember my "Navy Showers" from the submarine days and I will try to incorporate these in my daily life. Basically a "Navy Shower" is one where you get wet, turn off the water, soap up, turn the water back on, and rinse. I already have an in-line stop valve (The in-line stop valve prevent the water temperature from changing) installed as the result of a lazy attempt to fix our plumbing (Before I bit the bullet and replaced the actual valve) , so it is just a matter of using it. If I assume that the shower head we have complies with the national standard (2.5 gallon per minute) and that I take a ten minute shower every morning and after every work-out, cutting out eight minutes of water would save ten-thousand four hundred gallons of water every year. That is nothing to laugh at when you consider the potential crises that our water wasting is likely to cause in the coming years. And all it takes is a two dollar valve, minimal plumbing skills, and some will-power.
2. Look at the "Small Picture": Everyone, especially in the business world, likes to talk about the "big picture" and the need to stay focused on that. I guess there is a time and place for this, but in my new life of animal advocacy, the "big picture" is so daunting that it often paralyzes well-meaning people. With approximately ten billion animals raised atrociously and killed callously just for food in this country each year, the "big picture" has no time for the small victories that can and should be made. Even if we can only help a fraction of one percent of these animals, that is a task worth doing and those are lives that would have otherwise been lost. I struggle with this every day since I feel like I can't win and it is important to recalibrate what this means by focusing on the "small picture". I am going to try to look at it this way: If the world's suffering is equated to the grains of sand on a beach, clearly I can't fix all of that. But even a negligible amount of sand can be used to make amazing sand sculptures or castles. I need to focus on what I can do and how to make it matter most.
3. Live for Today: In addition to being a great album (By Boysetsfire, if anyone is interested), it is a mindset that I want to adopt this year. I have become very aware of the fact that so many of my decisions and moods are influenced by what may happen in the future. Whether it is fear over the future of my job, anxiety over whether I will land a job I actually enjoy doing at some point in my life, whether or not to adopt a sweet rat, or how much longer I will have my Heidi in my life, the future and the past always find ways of creeping in. Now, I would never advocate a negligent "live fast, die young life" for anyone (Too late for me anyway), but I don't want to be paralyzed by this anymore. None of us know how many more tomorrow's we have, but I can hazard a guess at how many today's I have squandered out of fear. That's not what living life is about. We can't live when we insulate ourselves from pain and risk. We have to be able to face it and experience it if we want to fully appreciate this gift that we have been given.
4. Buy Local (As Much as Possible): This is one that has become more important to me as I watch what appears to be the death gasp of this country's economy and the role that buying cheap and non-local has played in getting us to this point. I am often repulsed by the fact that I work for a company that has exported so much of their labor overseas, but then again it is hard to find any in this country that haven't done the same. The fact that this new norm exists should give us all pause. I have neither the aspiration nor the skills to aspire to change this from the top, but by trying to buy local I can do two things. First, I can reward those merchants who are trying to stay alive. While I have no particular nostalgia for these "mom and pop shops", I do believe that they have more personality and are more integral to any landscape than their multi-national corporate competition. Secondly, I can afford to, for now. It's no secret that these stores normally cannot compete with Walmart or Target's razor thin profit margins or loss-leaders, but in a business that is all about volume, the more power that we can give the local operations, the better. Beyond buying local, I would love to buy as much "Made in the USA" products as possible, assuming this is still possible and that this label hasn't been diluted to the point of meaningless.
5. It's All About Me: This sounds bad on the surface, but what it means to me is that I need to live my own life and seek out my own merit without comparing myself to others. There will always be someone in a more powerful position, either financial or influential, but that doesn't mean that I should look at what I do as without merit. If we all volunteered even one hour of our time, or gave just twenty dollars a year to a charity, our world would look a heck of a lot different than it does today. We would all be off the sidelines and in the game, even if we weren't the star players.
