Being Mindful - The Key to Living a Green Lifestyle

Living a green lifestyle does not imply it’s an all (read: Perfect) or nothing endeavor. Oh, quite contrare. Living a more ‘green’, or as I prefer to call it, ’sustainable’ lifestyle simply means being mindful of your choices.

Mindfulness often involves reframing, rethinking and reevaluating how we go about our daily lives. Being mindful means questioning the status quo. It means going beyond black, white and gray solutions. It means the deliberate act of: stop, think, question and decide on a solution that works for you.

Compromise is a word that becomes familiar when you are mindful of your choices. Let me illustrate.  If you’re like me, you don’t have a checking account with a bottomless balance. You’ve got a budget and you need to stick to it. This requires making a few choices along the way. A few choices that may require a compromise. You want the solar powered can opener but it’s expensive. And, has a lot of packaging. Next to it is a manual can opener. It’s made with stainless steel, is heavy duty and is built to last a lifetime. It has minimal packaging and is more in line with your budget.  Next to that is another can opener – also manual, significantly cheaper but the quality is questionable. There’s lots of plastic parts that are just begging to break rendering the utensil useless.  Which do you choose?  See, you have to stop and think. Congratulations, you’ve just learned what it takes to be mindful.

When you’re present in the moment, stopping to think about what you are buying will help you to focus on the process of living green rather than the result of buying the ultimate green item.  You may not be able to buy the solar alternative, but you may be able to swing the middle option – better quality and with less packaging. It’s a start.  Being mindful is the process of getting in touch with who you are and what works for you – not everyone else. That also means learning to let go of guilt (more on that in another post) and be happy with the choices that you’ve made.

Tags: green lifestyle, green living, living a sustainable life, mindful choices

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Green Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.