I got a package in the mail!  And really, who among us doesn’t like getting a package and need to share that fact with all three of her readers?

A couple of weeks ago, Kelly Whalen at The Centsible Life, did a giveaway of Sun & Earth cleaning products.

Excuse me for a moment while I wax rhapsodic.  I know some people like to clean, but I am not one of them.  I am also allergic to every chemical in the world.  (Once upon a time, my not-yet-husband came to visit me.  I had just scored a great Craigslisted couch, but it smelled bizarre.  In anticipation of his arrival, I sprayed the couch with some seemingly benign de-scenting spray.  I spent the whole visit covered in hives.)

But Sun & Earth… ah, Sun & Earth.  Not only does it leave my allergies alone, but I find the bright citrus-y scent irresistible.  I wouldn’t say that it makes me want to clean, but it comes pretty close.  Orange groves = yum.

Unfortunately, I had to leave my almost brand new, massive bottle of Sun & Earth with my ex-roomies in DC.  I might have made room for it had I realized that they don’t sell it in Washington!  Sorrow.  So when I saw the Sun & Earth giveaway, I had to try.  Many thanks to the random number generator that chose me as the winner!

Here it is — a stash of cleaning products that will last me well into the winter, which is a good thing, because if I want any more, I have to order them off the internet.  It is also great because it saves me money.  Not a huge amount, but money all the same.  And as much as we would like to think that money doesn’t matter, the fact is that it does, although possibly not for the reason you might think.

People often say that money is power.  I say that money is choices.

You may not notice this phenomenon if you are in control of your finances.  But once things begin to spiral out of control – debt, unemployment, really anything that causes uncomfortable scarcity on the financial front – you can watch your choices disappear.  Big choices, little choices, one by one – until you feel trapped.  (Interestingly, sometimes losing the little choices can be harder than the big ones.  I wouldn’t mind spending my vacation camping rather than going on a cruise, but I would definitely mind eating nothing but ramen for a month.)

A common assertion in the “going green” dialogue is that living, eating, and acting sustainably is a luxury of the financially well-off.  I disagree for many reasons (among them, that minimizing your consumption is one of the greenest things you can do), but the core of the assertion is true.  If you are financially unbalanced, you have fewer choices.  And, more importantly, you feel like you have fewer choices.  Because you feel trapped, you might not even see the options available to you.

Achieving financial balance is important because it allows you to choose what you do with your life.  From how you spend your money to how you spend your time, having choices matters.

Which is why my daily media inputs include a collection of personal finance resources, The Centsible Life among them.  By learning about personal finance, and putting it into practice, I create more choices in my life.  So thanks, Kelly, for the insight.  And thanks for the fun giveaway.

Now, please excuse me while I go find something to clean.

Disclaimer:  In the interest of mocking the FTC’s now-mandatory full disclosure,  no one paid or gave me anything to write this post.  I’m a fangirl for free.

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The Washington Post has a very interesting, albeit buggy, little doodad: the POTUS tracker.  It is a calendar that creates a graphical representation of how President Obama’s schedule.  The idea is to generate a picture of what issues, groups and individuals are getting the President’s time and attention, to give the viewer a clearer impression of the “real priorities” of the Administration.  Rather than look at the agenda and identify importance according to the nature of the issue, this method works in reverse, assigning importance based on allocation of time.  You can sort it by month, issue, type of event and who was in attendance (that is, if your browser doesn’t crash first).

Access to this type of tool can fundamentally change how we see politics.  It enables us to look past the talking points and see who is the real recipient of the Most Important Thing: time.  Time is my most precious; it is exponentially more so for the President.  This snapshot of how he spends his time yields clues as to which people and what issues are “hot button” enough to be a true priority.  This kind of information is power.

We can learn a lot from looking at our own lives this way.

Take a step back from who you think you should be and what you think you should be caring about, and take a look at the choices you make.  It can be a pretty enlightening experience.  For instance, I majored in political science with an emphasis on global politics.  Yet every day I find myself reading the science, technology, and business sections of the newspaper.  I loved my major, but what if I had noticed that sooner?

I spent a lot of time when I first moved to DC being hard on myself for not going out more.  Museums, art, theater, music, it’s all right there waiting for you.  But I would find myself at home on Friday night, curled up on the couch with the dogs watching a movie, completely and perfectly happy.  I lived in an underground hole so they could have a yard.  Money was spent on vet bills and good food for them, not weekend trips to New York to visit friends and go to the theater.  Looking at it in reverse, no matter how important those other things seemed, my priorities were clear.  And they were so far from what I expected them to be, based on the picture I had in my head of who I was.

The fact is, sometimes we don’t have a very clear understanding of our own priorities.  We think we know what our priorities are.  We often say, “I will make that a priority,” as though we have some master list somewhere.  We’ll shift whatever it is to above washing our cat – no one likes to wash cats – but below setting the DVR to record the NBC fall lineup.  But often what we think our priorities are, or what we think our priorities should be, is not reflected in the way we spend our time.  If information is power, then an honest assessment of how we spend our time and our lives is an invaluable tool in seeking sustainable, true-to-ourselves happiness.

So suspend judgment for just a moment and take a look.  Don’t criticize yourself for what you should be doing or thinking or feeling.  Instead, what can you learn from what you  are doing and thinking and feeling.

What are your “priorities?”  How are you spending your time?  And are you happy?

(Also, go to the POTUS Tracker and click on health care.  Then choose almost any other issue and move the slider from January to September.  You can see how much the health care debate has eclipsed almost everything else, foreign policy be one of several exceptions.  This is particularly unfortunate given the current level of irrational discourse going on about health care right now.)

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How many times have you told yourself that you need to find a better work-life balance?  Well guess what?  Work-life balance is a lie.  I know sometimes you feel like a zombie at the end of a long day at the office.  But unless you are actually undead at work, in which case you’re probably too busy lurching around biting people to be reading this, the concept of work-life balance is of no use to you.

Work-Life Balance Is a Lie

The idea of work-life balance is a lie because it creates an artificial separation between your job and your life.  “Work-life balance” implies that your job is not a part of your life.  How is it that we categorize 40+ hours a week as something other than life?

There are 168 hours in a week.  Theoretically, we all spend 8 hours a day – 56 hours a week – sleeping.  (Does anyone actually sleep 8 hours a day any more?  I try, but usually fail.)  This leaves 112 waking hours.  If you work only 40 hours a week, and many of us work more than that, that is 35% of your waking time that you just counted as “not life.”  A full third of your life that is something else.  And according to the work-life balance principle, that’s not living.  It’s work.

This concept we have that our jobs are not part of our life indicates a dangerous level of compartmentalization.  Not only are we writing off a third of our life, but by separating our jobs from living, we end up with multiple standards for how we spend our time.  If work isn’t life, it becomes okay to be miserable about our jobs.  It’s just a job.  The interactions we have with our coworkers take on different criteria – they’re just coworkers, after all.  Keep it civil and get through the day.  And we often let ourselves feel victimized in the context of our workplace.  Even people who are good at taking control of other areas of their lives often feel like they have less control over their “work lives.”  How many times have you felt like you just go to work and try to get through your day?  Do you really want to be “just getting through” a third of your life?

Work Isn’t Your Job

A job and work are not the same thing.  You may have to work at your job, or you may not.   (Studies have shown that the average office worker does 1.5 hours of work in a day.)  Even if you do work hard at your job, your job is not work.

Calculate Your Balance

I found a little work-life balance calculator that improves upon the two-part work/life division.  It divides your time into six categories: work, sleep, leisure, meals, commute and chores.  I am not saying that the calculator doesn’t have its uses.  When I was living in Los Angeles, I didn’t realize the effect my commute was having on me until it started impacting my social life, energy levels, and my health.  If I had entered it into the calculator, I would have seen that I was spending ten percent of my time commuting!  When I moved to DC, my commute decreased to three percent of my time, and it made a difference.  But even this more complex division ignores the complexities of life, especially with regard to leisure time.

For example, I just started riding horses again.  Three days a week I go to the barn, feed horses, clean water buckets and do barn chores.  Often, this is work – not as in job, but as in good, old fashioned, give you blisters, hard work.  So how do we categorize it on the calculator?  Is it work?  I assume by “work, they mean job, so we’ll say no.  The barn is a half hour away, so that is certainly commuting time, but does it count if it’s not a commute to a job?  Plugged into the calculator, that is four to five percent of my week driving back and forth from the barn – it seems like it should count for something.  And what about chores?  It looks like chores, it feels like chores, but I’m paying for the privilege to do them.  The one thing it would seem to count as is leisure.  But for leisure, it sure is a long commute and an awful lot of hard work! (Also, where is exercise on this calculator? That must count as leisure too.)

How about gardeners, especially vegetable gardeners.  Gardening can be very hard work, physically.  If you grow your own food, it will offset your grocery bill, saving you money that theoretically would come from a job.  Also, it is meal-related – time spent shopping for and preparing them.  Is gardening a chore or a leisure activity?  If you belong to a co-op or sell at a farmers’ market, is it a job?

Life Is Work

The reason it is not easy to make these distinctions is that the separation doesn’t actually exist.  Work-life balance is a myth.  Last time I checked, most things in life take work – hard work.  Going to the office, growing your own food, caring for your kids, keeping up your home, being a good neighbor – all of this is work.  And all of this is life.  “Don’t live to work, work to live.”  We do both, because life is work.  And long before we offices, humans went about the work of living, there was just less paper and fewer middlemen to make it seem like work and life are separate things.

It’s okay that living is work.  But it’s not okay that we’ve been trained to think of work as a separate thing, to be balanced with our real lives, whatever that means.  This separation prevents us from finding true balance, a “life balance,” if you will, with all its subtle intersections.

In order to live balanced, integrated lives, we must change how we think about life.  The hours we spend at our jobs is just as much a part of our lives as the time spent not at our jobs.  And it’s okay that the hours spent not at our jobs often seem like work.  By separating work and life, we discourage ourselves from making the choices that allow us to pursue balance – a full life balance, all 100% of it.

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“Environmental solutions that depend solely on will power are doomed to fail,” states David Owen, author of the soon to be released book Green Metropolis, which was recently reviewed in the New York Times. Owen argues that cities are the answer to the sustainable living issue, as a variety of factors (public transportation, smaller living spaces, etc.) result in a smaller environmental footprint for urban dwellers than that of their suburban counterparts.  I can’t really comment on that without reading the book, but I look forward to taking a closer look when it is released.

In the meantime, Owen’s gloomy assertion of will power may not be true.  In a similarly gloomy straw poll, Reuters concludes that people are unwilling to make radical lifestyle changes that will help the environment.  However, the poll found that people are more likely to make fundamental life changes for altruistic reasons than they are for financial reasons.

So how does that work?  People are willing to make little changes, such as recycling, for altruistic reasons.  Other small changes, like using compact flourescent lightbulbs, have financial advantages in addition to being environmentally beneficial.  But few people are going to become vegetarians because it will save them money, even though it will.  It takes a greater calling to stop eating meat or give up your vehicle.

This means that Owen’s assertion may be incorrect and fundamentally changes the discussion on incentivizing global change from the ground up.  While financial incentive programs may be sufficient to motivate incremental change, they will not be enough to bring change on the level required to avoid disastrous levels of environmental decline.  Fundamental change on a global scale will be the sum of individuals changing their lives for the greater good.

At the heart of this equation lie education and mechanisms.  People need to be educated on the issues at hand.  And once they are convinced, the mechanisms for action must be clear.  As mentioned today on TreeHugger regarding a new iPhone application that helps buyers choose organic produce, no one wants to “read through a scientific article at each produce bin.”  Global interrelation is all shades of gray, but we must begin to break down information on sustainability into bite size chunks, or the battle for the masses will be lost.

We also must fundamentally reevaluate our understanding of motivation, because some changes can’t be bought.  Some changes happen because you believe in them.

Related posts:

1. Climate Change Is Just Like Raising Baby Mice
2. Ten Climate Change Terms Everyone Should Know

What makes for a “good week” in sustainability news?  Lots of news?  A week more or less devoid of major crises?  Big breakthroughs in science and technology?  Maybe it’s just a week of active and constructive dialogue about sustainability and the big picture?  This week was definitely the latter.

In Living Sustainably in the City, we heard about the importance of cultivating personal sustainability… personally.  Each of us is different and our solutions will be as unique as we are.  And that’s okay – in fact, it’s a good thing.  Who wants to live in a world where everyone is just like they are?

Michael Renner discussed how social and economic hardship affect environmental choices from the consumer side.  A commenter pulls climate change policy into the discussion as well.

On Monday, I got totally jazzed about this ‘Eco House.’  Wouldn’t it be great if we could head that direction with all new construction?

Then another installment in the debate about the definition of our word of the day:  “Sustainability” As More Than a Political Buzzword (Plus, doesn’t their simulation software look like SimFarm? I loved that game!)

And we had part two of What Are the Barriers to Mass Adoption of Sustainability.  I missed part one back in June, but both are excellent.

Then we had a bunch of news spam regarding the Dow Jones Sustainability Index Annual Review.  Companies moved around.  Moved up.  Moved down.  Press release central.  Greenwash central.

Midweek I fell in love with this baby cow.  Mike Peterson’s story isn’t half bad either.

And finally, we have the will but we lack the skills.  That is, the will to be self-sufficient is held back by a lack of homesteading skills in the UK. I suspect we share that problem here in the U.S.  Except me, because I totally know how to butcher my own cow. (Not really.)

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Today’s post was supposed to be about how to build a great garden for free, which is what I was planning on doing today.

Instead, it is about a baby mouse, which is what I spent my afternoon doing.  Because that’s just how my life goes.  The garden will still be there.

Mice are near and dear to my heart.  In third grade, I found in the school library an amazingly thorough book on the care and feeding of mice.  In the breeding section was a beginning walk-through of Mendelian genetics and coat coloration, which fascinated me in spite of the fact that I barely understood a word of it.  What third grader can resist “heterozygous” and “alleles”?

I was in love.  I prepared a presentation for my parents about why I should be allowed to get a mouse; how I would care for it, how much it would cost and how I planned to pay for it.  They relented, Ned joined the family, and thus began many years of multi-colored mice and chicken scratch Punnetts squares.

So today, when I discovered a baby mouse writhing under a clod of dirt in the compost pile I had just demolished, I did not hesitate to nestle it in my sweatshirt and put it in the car.  I called my mom and asked her to Google whether baby mice need kitten/puppy formula or raw goat milk (the former, or human infant formula).  In the background, my grandfather said, “You can’t keep mumble mumble… diseases!”

Oh yeah.  Diseases.

It’s not that I didn’t know that wild mice have diseases, or that I forgot momentarily that this little creature could be carrying all sorts of ick that I don’t want in my house.  But I hadn’t thought about it, because this decision wasn’t about a mouse and disease.  Like so many things, this was a question of risk.

Baby Mice Are A Risk

You are at risk every day.  When you drive your car, you’re taking a risk.  (Accident -> dying)  Eating at a restaurant, risk. (E-coli -> dying)  Just getting out of bed is a risk. (Falling down -> maybe dying?)  But staying in bed is a risk too!  (Lack of exercise, obesity, dehydration, your skin growing into the fabric of your sheets -> dying!)  There is absolutely nothing you can do to escape the fundamental risks of being alive. (Except dying.)  So a big part of life is determining your personal relationship with risk.

In order to figure out where we stand with risk, we have to weigh and measure the potential reward and the potential cost of inaction.  I drive my car and, most days, I don’t even think about the fact that I am risking death.  Base jumping: not okay for me on the risk meter.  Skydiving: okay, but maybe not once I have kids.  Riding horses: okay.  Rollerblading: not okay – it’s not fun enough to be worth it!

It’s a very personal thing.  For my grandfather, bringing home a potentially diseased baby mouse is not below his risk threshold.  But I am young and healthy.  I have good healthcare.  And if I didn’t bring this mouse home, it was as good as dead.  I brought her home.

Which brings me to one of the most important risk scenarios facing us as a planet: climate change.

Climate Change = Diseased Mice?

If you haven’t seen it already, I beg you to take nine minutes and thirty-three seconds out of your busy life and watch this video.  There are white boards and smiley faces.  It’s good and funny.  And it is vitally important.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Climate change is also a matter of risk.  A matter of measuring the risk of action with the cost of inaction.  Is not taking action on climate change worth the risk?  What does your risk meter say?

For me…

Climate change?  Not okay.  Baby mouse?  Okay.

Related posts:

1. Ten Climate Change Terms Everyone Should Know

I have been waiting impatiently for the release of Julie & Julia. I confess to having a bit of a crush on Amy Adams, and more than a bit of a crush on food. Not to mention that, as a blogger, this little (BIG) blogging success story was just what I needed to stave of depression in the wake of my husband’s deployment.

I loved Julie & Julia. That statement is possibly the only positive thing you’ll read on the internet about this movie. I will say further that I loved not just the half of it that everyone else loved, but the whole of it. But this is not going to be a movie review. Just go see it.

Are you back? Ok. Now that you’ve seen the movie…

I have to admit that I, like Julie Powell, was surprised and a bit heartbroken when I learned that Julia Child was highly critical of the Julie/Julia Project. I assumed this struggle for personal meaning was something that she would intrinsically “get.” I was further surprised to read quite a few reviews that criticized not the movie (although some of those as well), but rather Julie Powell both for starting the Julie/Julia Project and as a person. I have to say, I don’t get it.

Julia Child’s legitimacy came from achieving a level of culinary professionalism unknown to women at that time. She was successful in large part because she was an expert, and because she was able to translate her expertise to others.

Julie Powell is illegitimate. Or, at least as illegitimate as any person who decides to start a blog and document their personal journey, be it a journey towards financial stability, weight loss, or living a greener life. She was not an expert, but she cooked her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, which is more than most of us can say for the projects in our lives.

Child learned to cook because she loved food. Powell started the Julie/Julia Project in a moment of desperation and personal crisis. But I bet she learned a lot about cooking while she was at it.

Which brings me to my point. Does intent matter?

Listening to NPR the other day, I heard a report about a business owner who installed solar panels on the roof of his building. He doesn’t believe in climate change, but he stands to make $18,000 per year selling energy back to the grid. He will produce enough electricity to power over 30 homes.

There is tons of money built into the climate change bill for residential efficiency improvements (new windows, insulation, etc.). Most people who take advantage of this policy and retrofit their homes will likely do it because it will save them money on utilities and increase their property values on the government’s dime. For many, the environment is an added bonus or a political talking point.

Eating organic is healthy. Eating organic is trendy. Eating organic decreases the excess nitrogen runoff from farms that is destroying the biodiversity of our rivers and coastlines. Wait a second… were you thinking about reducing nitrogen runoff when you headed for those organic strawberries? No? Because you just spent your money like you did.

I think both Julia Child and Julie Powell are very impressive women. And I am glad that, more and more, there are other reasons to make environmentally sustainable choices. Because sometimes, it’s not about why you’re there. Sometimes, it’s just about showing up.

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So I’ve been gone. For a long, long time. But I promise that I have a good reason – reasons, actually.

We did get our internet back after about a week of intermittent outages. Then, we found out my boyfriend was deploying. He’s in the Army, which is how we ended up in Washington in the first place. The Army is still doing year-long deployments. A year is just a long time no matter how you look at it. For many reasons, we decided to get married before his departure date. Both the marriage and the deployment meant that we had family in and out for several weeks.

Amidst all the chaos, we tried to take advantage of the time we had left, which meant a lot less time on the computer for me. I have absolutely no regrets about that, but I feel terribly out of touch. So much has happened while I was living in my bubble!

There was another unexpected side effect to being as busy as we were: It was so hard to stay green, sustainable and balanced.

• The first thing to go out the window was the way we ate. I am embarrassed to say that I consumed more fast food in the last month than I have the rest of the year combined. And that includes my cross-country road trip. When we didn’t eat fast food, we often ate out, grabbed take-out, or – the worst in my opinion – ate junk food at home. (Don’t ever let someone tell you that you can’t live on popcorn. You can, at least for a month.) We spent a bunch of money, generated a bunch of trash, and felt like crap. It was not a healthy month for us.

(Even when I did better with my choices, it still wasn’t sustainable. Come on already, Jamba Juice, get biodegradable cups! You’re bumming me out and hurting your image.)

Aside from eating and all the food-related trash, it was also much harder to stay on top of some of my more sustainable habits. Some things that went out the window:

• Buying used. Buying new is so much faster.
• Supporting local businesses. One stop shopping can be much more convenient, especially when you’re short on time.
• Making my own bread. I apologize, sour dough culture, for killing you so many times this month.
• Product research. I’m usually very good about paying attention to where my money goes. This month, I just went out and bought what I needed.
• Exercise! How can I have gone a whole month without doing anything outside of walking my dogs.

But being human means that, no matter how hard you try, you will sometimes fall short of your own hopes and expectations. All the ups and downs of life are going to happen, whether we are prepared or not. We are a society conditioned for the path of least resistance, which is very easy to wander down when the going gets busy. And, clearly, all my good habits need a little more practice. Including blogging!

So, I am sorry, world, for my absence from sustainable and responsible citizenship, from news reading, and from actively dialoguing about the things that I care about. I can’t say it won’t happen again, but in the meantime, I’ll do my best to build good habits for next time.

No related posts.