As we all know, old habits are hard to break.
We are generally quite mechanical beings, as we go through our day, largely governed by muscle memory and thought loops that serve as practical time-savers in order to get the “job” done. Routine tasks would be much more time consuming if we had to think about every little step. The downside is that we tend not to exercise the spontaneous, more creative parts of ourselves. Try sometime to pull back your thoughts and stop your motions and just observe the state of your mind and body during your daily routine. You will find that even remembering to do this is very difficult to do. You might do it once or twice as a novelty, but then the magnetic pull of the hum drum beat of everyday life pulls our thoughts and actions back into routine, and we are lost again in the task at hand.
As old habits are hard to break, new habits can be equally hard to instill in our-selves.
There has been a lot of buzz lately about building conservation into our lives. I think this is a positive trend as conservation, for example of petroleum, has the potential to have a much bigger impact in the short, and even mid-term as opposed to technological upgrades and breakthroughs.
Here is a list of some of the habits that I have built up over the last few years in the name of conservation, some obvious ones that have been widely advertised, and some more obscure and idiosyncratic.
- replacing incandescent bulbs with cfl’s.
- not using lights during the daytime in the bathroom (this obviously depends on your window situation)
- turning off the water during tooth brushing.
- Sponge washing the car with a gallon of water in a bucket using organic soap (my favorite is Dr. Bronner’s Pure Castile soap) and then a very quick rinse, the minimum needed to get most of the soap off. I don’t care that my car is not spotless, my image is in no way tied into my car as is many’s.
- I turn off the light while brushing my teeth at night.
- Unplugging my toothbrush charger two days out of every three (more or less).
- Shorter, cooler showers.
- Relentless turning off of lights in unoccupied rooms.
- Instead of wrapping uneaten food like ½ avocados, or melons, etc in plastic wrap, I use permanent plastic containers.
One change that can cumulatively make a huge difference, but for which I have not yet developed consistent habit yet, is keeping vehicle tires at optimum air pressure. I really need to apply some pressure into this little matter of my life.
Thinking of other ways to save is a good exercise in creativity, helping to break us out of our mechanistic lives.
