…and I guess I was just in a prose kinda mood.
I was thinking recently about when I decided that sorting other peoples recycling (yes I really did this, just ask my old roommate!), hugging and nuzzling with trees and bugging people to turn off the lights when they arent in the room became important to me. See I can’t seem to pinpoint one of those “Aha!” moments that many people have when they have a paradigm shift. All I can see is that somehow I became aware of how ignorant we were raised as to the effect we have on our surroundings and so I never took notice. And then one day, I did.
The real interesting thing to me, is the fact that this doesn’t just apply to the planet. We can easily be very ignorant about how what we do affects people around us as well. I know I sure can.
And after all those years of working my ass off in the arts and creating some amazing things, it’s like I was always careening towards this inevitable collision with working as “a professional treehugger”, as I like to call my job when other people ask “what exactly do you do again?” Yes, I’m a professional hugger of trees. I give them a good squeeze and tell them they’re still pretty cool for things besides paper (the business I work in, oddly enough).
I used to struggle with why it mattered if I turned off my lights for a certain amount of time or recycled my old computer monitor or used less of pretty much everything, since my impact was so tiny. But ultimately, I’m not the only one doing it, and that’s pretty rad in and of itself. Two points for the green team!
And I also have this awesome wife who makes such a concerted effort to pick out sustainable items and improve our life in a sustainable manner because she knows it means so much to me. That’s simply incredible to have that in my life. Pretty soon we get to share all of that with our amazing little girl, too.
But ultimately, it just makes me super happy to be part of something that really matters to me. That was what made theatre and dance such a special part of my life and it’s what makes me love spending hours filing environmental permits that make others wanna vomit. So I guess I picked the right path this time. And that’s pretty good.
