2020 Vision.

Well Christmas has come, gone and been all packed up for another year. 2019 has come, gone and now we move on. In that no man’s land time between Christmas and New Year I hope you found some time to relax, refresh and look forward to a new year with hope and vision. I find new years peculiar things, after all we count our years as a way to mark and make some sense of time as we travel through life and we have lots of occasions by which to mark time; birthdays, significant life events, anniversaries, holidays and all sorts of special cultural days which we observe. I tend to look at life as a series of new days rather than new years. Also, I am not big on new years resolutions because mostly they last about two weeks.

However, last year I did have some ideas on how I wanted to travel through 2019. The inspiration for this came from the Netflix series by Maria Kondo which I watched with my son over the Christmas break. I had already read her book and although I have never actually employed the Kondo method, for many years I have been an on going declutterer. Each holidays hubby used to joke that he needed to keep moving or he would find himself in the recycle bin!

The above image is the poster I made to keep myself on track as I went through what I called my year of reverse consumerism. I am very pleased to say that the year was a success. There were a couple of times when I almost fell off the wagon, but thankfully I did not. Although I did shop for gifts for others, I was able to avoid the shops, the sales and the temptation to just have stuff.

For 2020 my plan is to continue to walk evermore lightly on the globe. My goal is to continue to purchase quality second hand goods, because every time I do that I reduce the water, pollution and exploitation of workers in the fast fashion industry; to reduce and eliminate where possible single use plastic, especially plastic wrap; to conserve water and to choose natural over chemical.

Your vision for 2020 does not have to be the same as mine but I hope that somewhere you can find a place to make a change, even a small one, which will support our beautiful earth, its oceans and its human and animal inhabitants.