Painting by Belynda Wilson Thomas
If we’re not actively making things better, chances are we’re making them worse. William Westney
We create our life by the things we do daily. If we don’t eat well for a day that is okay, we can splurge for a day or a week on vacation, but if we keep doing it day after day we will notice it in a year.
Even if we start with one pushup per day if we do it for a year we will notice a difference. Just as if we’ve been doing some exercise, going for a walk, doing our pushups, doing yoga, and then we quit we will notice it over time. This is how we can have an event come up and we know what we’ll wear until we try it on.
My daughter is part of the bridal party for my son’s wedding. Her son will be not quite two months old. She’s going to see the seamstress next Friday because she worried if she went too quick the weight she’s losing would make her newly altered dress still too big. Breastfeeding is wonderful for slimming us down after having a baby. It’s feeding him every day that is doing the trick.
A friend asked me about setting up an RESP for my grandson. Get that compound interest to work she advised. She is right. Small amounts of money that are saved regularly and allowed to grow become something.
Writing a small amount every day becomes a book. All the years I spent thinking about writing didn’t get me anywhere but making it a habit has created three books.
Mom has walked almost daily for years, she is slowing down at 97 and lost her walking partner, but had she not been walking over these years she wouldn’t be as good as she is.
This isn’t about living a life of perfection, but we can make better choices over worse ones. Sometimes we make choices that make other choices necessary we don’t want to make. This is in part why I think we are having a housing crisis. We haven’t built the houses to house the people as our cities grow. There are lots of reasons for this. We want protected green spaces. We want to limit sprawl. We don’t want to build on the best farmland in Canada. Yet, we want to grow our cities and increase our population.
Population growth is happening and I do think we could encourage density by encouraging basement apartments, and low-rise multi-family buildings. Landlords are being made out to be the bad guy and they are providing what rental housing there is.
The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better. Robert F. Kennedy
My husband was doing a job for a landlord of a rental building. He and the landlord went for coffee, “They think I’m getting rich but I’m just holding on,” he lamented to my husband. Many small businesses are just holding on and a lot of big ones too, I’ll bet. Where will we be if the people who make things happen quit and many of them could? They could throw their hands in the air and retire to the beach on some small island and leave us to figure it out.
Rent controls were brought in while or before I was renting, but I never lived in the older buildings that were rent-controlled. Landlords are made to be monsters to want tenants who don’t pay enough rent for the utilities they use to move out. The idea that we can have things we don’t pay for is a strange idea. As we don’t have enough housing for everyone, those that can’t pay will be the ones left out as even marginal housing will get even more expensive. We think we can get past the law of supply and demand but of course, we can’t.
In many ways, I fear the last fifty or more years of living have not been sustainable in too many ways to mention. It doesn’t happen all at once it happens, one small decision at a time until here we are. That doesn’t mean I think things are hopeless, but we have things we have to deal with, and the decisions made will reverberate down the generations like they always do.
We will have to wrestle between conservation and growth. We have to do it in our individual lives, our communities, cities, and countries. We build our lives by what we do daily and we have created a habit of wastefulness. In our abundance, we didn’t think we had to be good stewards. Maybe we each need to ask ourselves what daily habits can we create to make things better in our own lives, and the lives of future generations. Is it still possible to leave things better than we found them?
Nobody has the ability to make things perfect, but we are given chances to make them better. Unknown
Every challenge is nothing more than a chance to make things better. Robin Sharma
Wanting less is probably a better blessing than having more. Mary Ellen Edmunds
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