New lenses

Already we are looking at life differently.

In two months we leave our current work and move out of the house. At work it is a matter of preparing for our successors, smoothing the way for their leadership, and removing the obsolete stuff that accumulates in a work environment. At home it is getting rid of what we don't need , packing what we want to keep, and deciding on the minimum stuff we will need to survive in 2009. For most of the year our home will be a 14' 6" (5 metre) caravan, so a lot of things have to go!

As we work through this process (slowly) it is obvious that much of the stuff we have is superfluous. It's nice to have some of the stuff, but we use it rarely and hang on to it out of habit or 'just in case'. And there are the bits that evoke precious memories.

Somehow we have come to think that these are the things of life, we have to have them, that we need them. Our desire for things, and a consumption driven economic system, has massive consequences we normally don't think about. How do we change and see things differently?

Frank Fisher wrote:
"To live sustainably we must identify and transform existing social and intellectual practices, making them consistent with sustainability. New intellectual and social lenses are needed to correct the astigmatism in our current ways of seeing." (The Age 6/11/2008 p.10)

For the moment we are looking at life and stuff differently. I wonder if this will continue beyond next year. It needs to!