Wisdom in truly unlikely places

In these first days of the new year, I’ve been taking stock – as I’m sure many of you have been doing – of what is important, what my priorities are and about what I want to achieve. I’ve already shared with you a few of my own personal health resolutions, but my biggest priority again this year is to become a greener, more eco-conscious person. Although I’ve made many progresses over the last year, there is still much room for improvements.

In my reflections, I realized that I had started wondering about the “whys” more then the “hows”. We are creatures of “hows”: How can I be healthier? How can I make more money? How can I be better? But how about asking why? Why am I not as healthy as I would like to be? Why do I not make the kinda of salary I wish I had? Why am I not the best person I can be?

I started thinking about going green and doing all these things. Asking the “Hows” was a bigger focus of my year in 2009. But last night, I surprised myself with a question I couldn’t fully answer:

Why do I have to make all these adjustments and changes in order to save the Earth?

Where did this questioning come from? You’ll never guess: From a Vancouver 2010 Olympics commercial. As they were talking about the site and environmentally sounds planning and developments surrounding the event, I was intrigued by a quote from the narrator:

“Treat the earth well: It was not given to us by our grand-parents, it was lent to us by our children.”

There is definitely beautiful awareness to be passed on from such a statement, but it also frustrated me a bit because the earth, and the shape it’s in, does have to do with our grand-parents and everyone that came before them. I’m not saying they necessarily knew how all of this would come to be, but it is very important to know where the problems come from in order to understand what we need to do and why.

Where am I going with this?

I’ve decided to make my first few posts of the year about understanding our past so we can better save our future. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting articles on movements, pioneers, scientific phenomena, theories and all kinds of topics related to the birth of our modern environmental conscience.

I hope you’ll come and read as I post them. If you have suggestions on topics, feel free to write them here. I’m hoping to make this year one of learning and information. I hope you’ll take the journey with me.

A new year …

Happy New year everyone!

I know I have been missing in action since the end of our 100-mile challenge, but time, circumstances and health (nasty carpal tunnel) kept me away from you all.

But I’m back and will try to stay focused and in touch as much as I can. With a new year come new inspirations and resolutions. Keeping this blog current and interesting is one of mine.

WHAT ARE YOUR RESOLUTIONS FOR THIS NEW YEAR?

My husband and I decided to sit down and really think these through this year. We wanted to start out the year with resolutions we knew we had a chance of keeping. There is nothing more frustrating than establishing goals knowing that there is a 50/50 chance you won’t be able to achieve them. So, we decided to be generous with ourselves and set them large enough that they would be forgiving, but tight enough that they felt rewarding. So, aside from the continuing efforts to become as green and eco-friendly as possible, here are the 4 resolutions we decided to work on this year:

• Be more active everyday! I know, not very inspiring, but we decided this year that instead of saying things like “We’ll go to the gym 3 times a week” or “We’ll start running every morning”, we were going to be honest with ourselves and set goals that are more fit to our habits. So, we promised ourselves that we would participate in a form of activity or another everyday : Whether it be a 20 minute walk, a trip to the public pool or simply taking 30 minutes to stretch and do sit ups at the house, we were going to do a little something everyday!

• Only drink coffee on the week-ends! That, to us, will most likely be the hardest one. We want to switch to tea and herbal teas for health reasons of course, but also to improve our sleeping patterns. My husband and I both suffer from restless sleep and we have noticed that on those mornings we don’t drink coffee, we sleep better that night. I know some people are more sensitive to stimulants and we may be some of them. Plus tea has so many health benefits such as :

Anti-cancer properties
Immune system boosting properties
Cardiovascular health properties
Reducing risk of strokes
Increasing metabolic rate and helping with burning fat
Antidepressant properties

And those are just a few that I found. So, although we love coffee, and we wouldn’t want to never drink it, we decided to keep it as a week-end treat.

• Try a minimum of one new recipe a week! One of the daily places where you can get stuck into a routine easily is food. Before you know it, you are eating the same 10-20 foods over and over and that just becomes very boring. So we have made it a point to start looking through cook books (when it’s time to grocery shop) and picking a recipe every week for which we will by all the ingredients for and cook! I look forward to sharing new recipes with you!
  

• Figure out what our absolute target weight is and try to stick to it! That will require finding out from reliable sources what that target weight is, what my body mass index and fat ratio are and working on getting myself fitter and healthier. It also will mean buying a scale! (Which I’ve never owned LOL!)

So there you go!

I would love to hear from you and know what your personal goals are for this year so please share!