I’ve been working on starting a business for about a year, Naturally Thrifty, a newsletter about living green and thrifty. It has been a crazy journey that has brought me to this place of “oh, fudge, this is just craziness.”

Yesterday, just for grins and giggles, I did the math of how many hours I spent writing about being green and frugal. Then I did the math of what I could have been doing, real time, to be green and thrifty. They I listened to music and had a cocktail.

This morning, after some cups of coffee, baby spit removal and a great BLT, I crunched all the numbers.

Shocking as it may be, but brutally honest, I was losing money, resources and sanity by driving myself into the grong re-inventing the wheel. Or, better stated, trying to become famous and leave my mark on the online green/thrifty blog-sphere.

And now, I’m off to take a nap…and to bookmark this post as you’ve said everything I always want to say, but have never had the time to do so.

=)

And never forget how much you may inspire someone else who reads your blog to change! Your journey to reduce plastics has certainly inspired me to do more in that area, so maybe the obsessive blogging is worth it after all :)

Wow.

I think I need to show up more often. Thanks for the reminder!

Mind you this Indian priest is not selling anything, not even his religion – he actually never talks about god -. Actually he is dead 20 years ago. I thought you might like to listen what he has to say, since you’re asking the same questions that he asks to lead you to sustainable happiness.

Philosophy is what separates us from other life. There is reality and there is what one makes of it. We have no control over our mortality, for example, but we have great control over how we think about it which determines how we deal with it. Our eyes are firmly planted on earth in the skull of a tiny “me” but our thoughts can fly freely.

The single biggest obstacle I’ve found to overcome is the narrow perception of time. You touched on it in your account of your time alone in nature.

My thought experiment is to see plants growing as if in a time lapse movie, to see solid rock wearing away or melting and flowing into new forms, to visualize continents moving, glaciers expanding and contracting.

We were all shocked to see the WTC disappear in a flash yet the whole of NYC will one day be completely gone without a trace. If the fossils of fish are found high in the Himalayas and oil is ancient vegetation now thousands of feet below solid rock, we know that nothing is permanent in place or form. It is only we who are frozen in a brief flash of time who clutch tenaciously to our precious things.

One has to have a hearty laugh from time to time at how seriously we take ourselves – a very sober collection of atoms!

As for the blogging, the speaking engagements and, in my case, picking up litter, just think of them as little plus signs that pop into existence; a colorful little firework that arches skyward with a sizzle. Think of the act of littering, or acting heedlessly or in ways that are harmful to the self or others as little minus signs; each made of heavy iron that drops to the ground with a clunk (right on the toes!).

I try to put some of those little plus signs into every day. Just walking outside and taking a deep breath is a little plus sign. They add up. To what? To being able to say at the end of a life: not bad, not bad at all!

That’s a good way for a collection of billions of atoms to end their time in one form before being rearranged. :)