My Sarah Wilson Round-Up of Signs The World is Improving

I’m an optimist. I’m seeing signs that the world is cottoning on to the need to change the way we brazenly consume and consume and consume. 

Image via 1 million women
Image via 1 million women

Almost seven years ago I (outrageously!) suggested we all eat 6-9 teaspoons of sugar. And stop drinking fruit juice. What do you know, the World Health Organisation came out in late last year with the same edict

The fringes and I have been banging on about toxins and plastics and waste and stuff that just makes the world a lesser place.

But it seems the Powers That Be are starting to catch up to the fringe. The world is moving faster in general. This makes sense. Information gets out faster and everything is more transparent. This is great stuff, when harnessed.

(PS: A fortnight ago I really went to town on the ecological hypocrisies of the wellness industry if you feel like an extra read. And last week I shared a list of eight bits of plastic you can quit right now.)

What do you think of these shifts?

The US bans toxic hand wash

The USFDA (Food and Drug Administration) recently released its decision on banning 19 active ingredients in antibacterial soaps. The ruling, 40 years in the making, caps a very lengthy debate over whether these chemicals are

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When someone expects you to be enraged, try this…

Silence.

xx

This appeared in my Instagram feed at a pertinent time, a time when rage was rightfully mine. You probably caught my post about choosing love over rightness, though. And can see it’s a theme for me right now. My moral and spiritual challenge.

I’ve written before how silence is beautiful and effective when a troll rages. It stops the venom in its tracks.

I ask, however, is silence appropriate for loved ones? Is it not a tactic? A game? And thus contributing to the bad behaviour we’d rather rise above, in love? I discussed this with my meditation teacher. “Love is a game,” he said. “It’s a dance. It can be artful.”

I guess it can be. Silence can provide a surprising vacuum into which the other can choose to expand beyond the

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8 bits of plastic you can quit right now

The Earth can’t digest plastic. Plastic things are bought and used and that’s it – the Earth is burdened further. This issue has reached critical point. And we have to act. All of us. Because we are the issue. I know some of us get flummoxed by the data. Which is why I thought I’d share this rant from Jeff Bridges – who I’d watch reading the Yellow Pages – by the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Can’t watch now? Here’s The Bits To Know:

  • Earth can’t digest plastic. Once it exists, it’s never going to be gone. Every bit of plastic that’s ever been made still exists on the planet. As time goes by plastic will separate into smaller and smaller pieces, but never completely biodegrades. And so….
  • Plastic in the ocean now outnumbers sea life six to one.
  • All (yes, all) sea turtle species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies.
  • One million sea birds are killed annually from plastic in our oceans.
  • Plastic chemicals, like BPA, are absorbed by the body. They disrupt hormones and your endocrine system. I’ve written on this before. It’s a big issue. Especially if you have autoimmune disease.
  • Aside from the BPA issue, which most people are aware of, plastic also contains DDT and PCB — two extremely toxic chemicals. The health effects of DDT include cancer, male infertility, miscarriages and low birth weight, developmental delay, nervous system and liver damage. PCBs also contribute to cancer and cause disorders of the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems.

So. Eight plastic habits to Change. Now.

1. Plastic cutlery. Totally wrong. It kills me that often health food shops with eco ethos’ are the worst for not supplying reusable stuff. This ain’t fringe thinking any more. France has just banned plastic cutlery, cups and plates. (So you know, 150 single-use cups are thrown away every second in France.) They’re aiming to cut landfill waste in half by 2025 and reduce greenhouse emissions 40 per cent by 2030.

Do this: Carry a splade in your purse/bag* (a spoon, fork and blade in one). Or a “spork” – spoon and fork combo – one at each end – available from reChusable.com.

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An apology

Hello Readers, This is an apology for the ghastly ads on my site the past week or so. I have a unique policy on ads.  The short version? I do very little advertising here on this site and only endorse or promote something if I personally use the product/service, and only if the product/service helps … Read more

Do you want to be right or to love?

I’ve had reason recently to visit this idea again. A most powerful idea, beautifully brought to us by Rumi.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I will meet you there.

Image via meggielynne.tumblr.com
Image via meggielynne.tumblr.com

More than six years ago I wrote about the idea in detail. I’d read a New York Times Modern Love column which was later turned into a book. Both saw the author Laura Munson go through hell with her husband, where she fought the urge to be right and he to be wrong (if played to this dichotomy he was so very in the wrong) and instead went out to the field. And sat. And waited. 

He came.

She describes the process like this:

“Here’s a visual: Child throws a temper tantrum. Tries to hit his mother. But the mother doesn’t hit back, lecture or punish. Instead, she ducks. Then she tries to go about her business as if the tantrum isn’t happening. She doesn’t “reward” the tantrum. She simply doesn’t take the tantrum personally because, after all, it’s not about her.”

So tough.

My meditation teacher Tim recently shared similar advice. “Do you want to be right or to love?”

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19 ways to have a waste-free wedding

When I turned forty, I wanted to celebrate with my nearest and dearest. But I didn’t want to just “chuck a party” with a whole stack of booze and booze-soaking food and…wastage. I wanted it to matter and, so I put it together as sustainably as I could possibly make it. I bought nothing new, used produce that was going to be thrown out and kept as many ingredients as possible within a 100-200km radius of the event.

Recently I read about three couples who did similar, for their weddings. Waste free! This stuff gets me excited.

Kat and Michael's homemade Tasmanian wedding - see below.
Kat and Michael’s homemade Tasmanian wedding – see below.

And so below, a list of ways to have a waste-free wedding. If you have a wedding on your radar, that is.

1. For the wedding meal, team up with an organisation that creates meals from food past its “sell by” date that grocery stores and bakeries would have otherwise thrown away.

2. At the end of the event, encourage guests to take home any leftovers.

3. Find your wedding dress on online classifieds website (like Gumtree) for $105. You might have to get a few alterations made, but the previous owner will be glad the dress is going to be used again.

4. Get your wedding rings made from reused metals.

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I’m tough because I give a shit

What makes someone tough? Strong in the face of adversity? Emotionally sturdy?

Image via Pinterest
Image via Pinterest

My literary crush David Brooks (catch up on my previous posts on him here and here) touches on this topic quite a bit. Recently in the New York Times he flagged the idea that emotional sturdiness “happens”. That is, we’re not born with it. Importantly, it builds over time from applying ourselves to a greater cause – a child, a cause, a need beyond ourselves.

We get tough when we fire the f*ck up. We get tough when we give a sh*t.

About something, someone, all of it.

What matters is caring, says Brooks, and this is what is missing when someone presents as emotionally fragile:

“Emotional fragility seems like a psychological problem, but it has only a philosophical answer. People are really tough only after they have taken a leap of faith for some truth or mission or love. Once they’ve done that they can withstand a lot.”

I’m told I’m tough. “Tenacious”, says my Dad. Resilient, several doctors have said. 

And yet I collapse in an emotionally-charged heap more often than I’d like. I’ve berated myself for dark, deep philosophical ponderings. I’ve tried to train my brain to care less, to be less passionate. But as I’ve aged, I’ve realised this vulnerability to the life-charged depths of existence is the grist to my mill. 

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I’ve been a nomad for six years. This is what it’s done to me.

I’ve not lived in my own place, with furniture and belongings around me, for a good chunk of my life.

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Image via benchandcompass.tumblr.com

I’ve never owned a fridge. Nor a washing machine. Nor an iron.

Six years ago I gave everything away, reducing my belongings to two suitcases, and decamped to a (frugally furnished) army shed in the forest just outside Byron Bay.

Since then I’ve lived out of two suitcases of belongings (sometimes just the one, for six months at a time), buying very little and roaming from Byron to Sydney to the Northern Beaches to London to Europe. And back. In and out of Air BnBs. Creating a community around me in Paris, London, Narrabeen – finding great yoga classes, cafes and libraries to work in, friendly grocers, friends in random places.

I got as far as buying a couch once. But moved before really getting around to sitting on it. It’s now in a tiny storage shed, along with a few other bits and pieces. I’m down to one suitcase again.

There’s much to say on living life as a nomad. Perhaps I’ll say more soon.

But today I wanted to share another thought I picked up in Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (last week I shared the value of loneliness).

She, too, is a nomad, living between sublet accommodations. Like me, she enters other people’s spaces, and

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Trust your contradictions

I’m on a roll with this theme: exploring beautiful ways to find challenges entirely rewarding. (Small admission: it’s sort of the theme of my latest book project).

Image via personalitycafe.com
Image via personalitycafe.com

I covered the value of loneliness last week and hunting down difficulty to have a good life the week before. Now contradiction. 

Again, Maria Popova at BrainPickings alerted me to a read I’d probably not find on my own. She pulled out some thoughts from Alfred Kazin’s Journal, which I’m now pulling out (the poor guy’s work has been shredded!).

Kazin writes about how the whole self-improvment industry has caused us to see life as something to fix. And contradictions as something to somehow fight/mesh together/solve. But why? Why do go against the grain of who we are…which is a bundle of contradictions. What if we saw life’s contradictions as more than just inevitable (to be accepted), but as good? Helpful?

This is the bit I liked:

Trust to the contradictions and see them all. Never annul one force to give supremacy to another. The contradiction itself is the reality in all its manifoldness. Man from his vantage point can see reality only in contradictions. And the more faithful he is to his perception of the contradiction, the more he is open to what there is for him to know. “Harmony” as an absolute good is for the gods, not for man.

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