Sustainability is a word that gets thrown around a lot these days, but I’m not convinced that we have a unified idea of what it actually means. In theory we might know that it involves some measure of energy conservation and efficiency, but it’s hard to translate our theoretical ideas about sustainability into real everyday practice. At least that’s what I’ve learned this past year. Sustainability in practice is tricky!

Why was I thinking about Sustainability this year? Well, for the past couple years instead of making New Year’s Resolutions I’ve shifted to a practice of choosing a “word of the year,” a word that I want to guide and inspire my actions throughout the coming year. I wrote about this practice last year in this blog post: “My Word of the Year 2018: Sustainability.” The previous year I chose the word “connect.” For me this practice has felt more manageable and motivating than resolutions. Rather than list things I want to change about myself, I’ve found it more helpful to do some deep thinking at the beginning of the year about how I want to go through that year. What do I want my guiding principle to be? Where am I wanting to go? What am I wanting to move towards? And what’s a word that encapsulates those desires and can help get me there, even when things are difficult?

Here’s what I wrote about Sustainability last year:

Sustainability is challenging, and that's exactly why I've chosen it. It's challenging in the sense that it's less active than "connect" (it's a concept rather than a verb), and it's challenging in the sense that one cannot look at sustainability without also looking at uncomfortable factors like time, resources, energy, and money. Sustainability also challenges that part of me that still somehow believes that in order to change my life I have to take drastic action and change everything. That part of me believes that the only way I can accomplish anything is to set unattainable goals and work myself until I'm tired beyond tired in the attempt of achieving them. That part of me needs some help! That part of me needs to learn the lessons of sustainability.

Looking back on that statement, it still rings true! Sustainability was a challenging word to guide my year because it was conceptual rather than active. It was not always clear to me what the sustainable action was in the challenging moments of 2018. Whereas, with “connect” in 2017 the action required of me was a bit more clear. So rather than transforming my life into a sustainable life, what actually happened was more of a contemplative individual study on how the concept of sustainability played out for me throughout the year. Sometimes this study was really frustrating and confusing, but through that agonizing process I learned some important things. In the end I was right in thinking that Sustainability had something to teach me!

What were those lessons of Sustainability? Well, today I’ll share three lessons with you that resonated the most as I look back on the year. Since this Sustainability project was focused on how the concept functioned in my personal life, these lessons are more applicable on an individual level. However, I believe they can actually translate to a larger societal context and inform how we look at the sustainability questions we’re asking in our larger communities and around the world.

3 Sustainability Lessons

#1. A sustainable life is one lived in accordance with one’s values.

It took me until November to really figure this one out, but to me this is the key lesson of this whole year’s experiment.

One of the reasons I wanted to focus on Sustainability in 2018 was because I wanted to examine my energy. I’ve struggled with fatigue and burnout in the past few years. I’ve experienced a level of fatigue that has been helped by but not resolved by health measures. I knew I needed to look deeper at how I was spending my valuable resources of time and energy to get to the source of this burnout and find a more sustainable way of expending my personal energy.

What I learned was that fatigue can certainly come when I’m acting in accordance with my values, but burnout (a state I now can identify when I start to feel numb, foggy, overwhelmed, and like even the tiniest easiest of tasks are unmanageable) is often a result of my actions being in discord with my values. Sometimes these discordant actions were activities that I thought would be fun! Like watching TV for long periods of time. Sometimes they were activities that I thought were important but were actually procrastination and avoidance strategies secretly disguised as productivity. The more time I spent checking off the less important items on my to-do list, the less energy I had to complete the items that were more important to me (but oftentimes more scary or less clear-cut).

One of the practices that helped me figure this out was taking an Energy Inventory. I spent about 3 months (from January -March) simply tracking my energy levels throughout various activities. I divided a piece of paper into 4 columns, titled Draining, Restorative, Neutral, and Energizing - and I categorized activities according to their observed affect on my energy. What activities were draining for me? Which ones were energizing? Which ones didn’t really matter either way? I had to actually observe their affects on me in order to figure that out.

This practice was enlightening! It was also more complicated than I initially predicted. There were some surprises. TV watching was not as restorative as I had expected it to be. Cleaning the house felt overwhelming in the moment but afterwards gave me a feeling of calmness and restoration. Some of the activities that energized me the most - things like writing or working on a motivating project - left me feeling tired once they were complete but tired in a satisfied kind of way. My energy inventory led me to a much greater self awareness and gave me some clues about the actions I had been doing and beliefs I had internalized that were ultimately were unsustainable.

For one thing, I had been expecting my body to be able to power through work 100% and not need rest. I had bought into this concept that if I was truly inspired by my work then I would never get tired and never need to rest. I’m calling bullshit on this idea right here and right now!!

Which brings me to Lesson #2…

#2. We cannot opt out of our body’s needs.

The 20th century (and early 21st century) seems to have devoted itself to squeezing more and more constant energy out of everything and everyone. Optimization, production, profit, and efficiency seem to be core values of this time. Rest, on the other hand, seems to be viewed as laziness. I certainly like the idea of working and constantly improving myself, but I learned this year that if I do not give my body the rest that it needs, then it will take that rest for itself later, usually in the form of sickness or a massive energy crash that will take me out of life for a week or more at a time. I wish it wasn’t that way! But grappling with the reality that my body just gets tired sometimes, no matter how inspired or fulfilled I am feeling, has been an informative challenge. I’ve slowly begun to feel less like a failure in those moments of crash, recognizing that rest is an essential need, for human beings, for animals, for the earth. Healing only takes place in a state of rest.

By beating myself up for needing rest I was actually preventing my body from getting that rest. I was also just being plain ridiculous. One day I asked myself - would I beat myself up for drinking a cup of water when I’m thirsty? No! So why am I beating myself up for resting when I’m tired? It’s just plain silly!

We have other needs too - the need for love, play, food, water, safety, movement, joy, laughter, community, creativity, and self-expression. These are not things to be ashamed of or to judge ourselves harshly for. Be skeptical of your own shame or judgment around your needs. Your needs are your own. They are okay! They are a fact of life. When we judge ourselves for having needs and feelings, we deny ourselves something important. Be suspicious too when someone tells you that you can somehow hack your way out of these human needs. It’s very likely they’re selling you something you don’t actually need. What you actually need is to honor and respect your body’s needs.

A system of living that ignores, denies, or unfairly judges our body’s natural and normal needs is ultimately an unsustainable system. I might add that a system that ignores, denies, or judges the needs of the earth is likewise unsustainable.

#3. Living sustainably requires wise management of the resources we already have.

I cannot stress this one enough. We’ve probably all had the experience of buying something we’ve already bought before - coming home with a huge bag of rice only to find we actually already had a giant bag of rice in the back of the pantry, buying a piece of clothing we thought we needed only to discover in the next closet clean-out that we already had almost exactly the same item. Losing track of and taking for granted what we already have can happen (and does happen) to any and all of us! And usually it results in unnecessary expenditure of a resource we could have saved or spent more wisely.

While the examples above relate more to how we manage our money and our “stuff,” how we manage our less tangible resources of time and energy can play out in a similar way. We can exhaust ourselves looking for ways to “fix” our energy when the actual solution might be to use the energy we already have more wisely. We might be yearning for time spent with friends and family, but when we get that valuable time we instead spend it lost in distractions like phone notifications or internal anxieties. We put off taking valued action because we’re convinced we first need more, more, more. More time, more energy, more stuff. The truth is that we likely already have what we need. Or if we do need something, it’s probably a lot more attainable than we think.

When I have lower energy days now I try to ask myself - what is the most important thing I need to focus my energy on today? What manageable steps are actually at my fingertips if I just focus on them? That focus of energy on the important rather than the minutiae is sometimes really tricky to summon, but a lot of the time I’ve noticed that focusing my small amount of energy strangely generates more energy! Or if it doesn’t, then at least I feel like I’ve expended the little energy I had in a way that meant something.

Embedded in this lesson is another lesson about gratitude and appreciation. When we take for granted what we already have, we inevitably wind up chasing solutions that are unnecessary and unimportant. That chasing drains our energy and resources in a way that ultimately breaks down and is unsustainable. Of course I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be working towards our dreams or reaching out for the things we do need! I’m saying that any valued action of a sustainable life must begin from a place of gratitude and appreciation for what we already have.

If you’re interested in starting your own sustainability project, I’d recommend starting there -
Try asking yourself -
What resources do I already have?
How am I currently using those resources?
What do I value the most in my life, and how can I use my time and energy in a way that honors those values?

Even if you don’t want to spend your entire year focusing on Sustainability like I did, I hope that asking those questions is helpful to you. Let me know if you do and if/how they’re helpful to you!

Have you tried choosing a word of the year? How did it work out for you? I’d love to know what you’re focusing on for 2019! As for me, I’m carrying the lessons of Sustainability with me into 2019, but in feeling the need for a more active word I’ve decided my new word of this year will be: Persevere!