Where are the lines?

There it is again, the nagging feeling of guilt. I guess it is a faithful companion to all who are thinking about the impact their lifes make on our environment. Sometimes reality just hits you in the face and you realise you can *never* change anything with your tiny babychanges.
You can always do more. Why are you still using plastic? What about the computer? I bet I still have a huge carbon footprint. I can never change even my own life to be sustainable... This is exactly why I decided to go through changes step by step. Because if I would want to change everything at once, I'd just be overwhelmed and discouraged.

To be absolutely consequent, we'd have to tell our 'modern' lives goodbye and go and live in a shack, knitting our own clothes and only eating what we can grow ourselves.

But wait... we've been there before, or our ancestors have. And we've come all the way from these lifes to what we have now. And there are reasons for this development.

I don't believe that going back is a solution. The solution must be to go forward, in another direction than the obvious. That might require to remember some things that went forgotten during our strive for conveniences. But it cannot mean that we have to give up all that we've worked for very hard in the past 100 years. It won't work anyways. We know what we could have... sitting in our shacks and knitting until our fingers bleed we will always remember the comforts that we had before. And eventually, we will turn back - without having made any changes at all, just repeated history.

If we want real change, we have to explore new paths. Not the old ones, not the ones that lie directly in front of us, but completely new ones.

What got me started on this were actually a few comments on my facebook post about the biketour that we took on sunday. Yes, I am driving. I like it, it's fun. It's not ecological. The thing is, I do not want to be the martyr who changes her life whilst everybody else goes on like always, on my costs (even if that is a bit of an unbalanced picture ^^). It's easy for people who do not want to change anything to look at people who actually try to do their best and say: "yeah, she/he's a freak and they've given up all that is fun, so why the hell should I do that?"

I want to live a life in this society, finding ways to profite from what comforts we have now, but sustainably. There are possibilities, and if we ever hope for an ecofriendly society, we have to start exploring and introducing them, step by step.
The aim must be to change normality to a sustainable life, to make people who don't have it be the freaks, not the other way round.

I am not a hippy, in terms of how people think of them. I do not want to get carried away by ideals that are too far away from reality and will never be ideals for a whole society. I want to keep both feet on the ground and in the world where I live.