You make your habits and then your habits make you.
Isn’t it an inspired quote?
A habit I am working on at the moment is always carrying a water bottle – or two actually – a small one in my handbag and a bigger one in my basket.
I am making a me that doesn’t buy bottled water.
There is only habit standing between me and non-bottled-water-buying me. My home water from the tank is so much nicer, actually sweet. And plastic water bottles are one of thoes thoughtless inanities for which we are trading the future of the planet.
Mostly I carry plain tank water in my bottle. But if I have to fill it with town water for any reason, the taste can be enhanced with a little squeeze of citrus juice – lemon, lime, tangerine, finger lime. Or a sprig of mint or peppermint. If I am taking a packed lunch, a cold water bottle keeps it all cool.
There is more than habit standing between me and all the other cold bottled drinks that make up a multi-trillion dollar industry. To me they are emblematic of the kind of thinking that has got us here in this dangerous place. They are one of my (I admit it – several) pet hates about our food industries.
We can do without them without any reduction in standard of living. We are better off without them – they’re just numbers, sugar, packaging, and marketing. And yet, for something we’d be better off without, we pay billions of tons of plastic, carbon, metals, and (I know it doesn’t come in tons but it’s the same kind of thing) visual space. When we could just catch and drink rain.
It would be funny in an absurd way if it weren’t so utterly tragic.
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