08/02/2022

I've moved the date of this newsletter to the first Tuesday of the month from here on out. I know from my own experience I don't really spend much time looking at my emails on a Sunday.

Working from home

I finished my first full month in my new job in January, spend a week with me in the video below

Saving the World with Spring Onions

In December, I became a genius.

In the midst of my Christmas cooking, I decided a really clever thing to do was to keep the bottoms of my spring onions so they could reshoot. The secret end goal here was to have a fully-fledged veggie garden grown from scraps like some sort of guerilla gardening hero.

A week or so in my shoots had gotten tall enough to trim down and reuse which felt like a win.

By the second week in, there was a bit of a pong. My husband gently mentioned we could probably stand to pot them outside somewhere, but I persevered ultimately knowing better.

Come week three there opportunities were limitless! A Spanish onion in my pantry had started to sprout, why not give that a go too?

By week four reality sunk in, my kitchen was starting to smell like sweaty feet. I was never going to need this many spring onions.

While my intentions were good, my passive action was becoming more trouble than it was worth. As I held my breath to clean out the cups that had bravely held their post on my kitchen counter for the last month, I began to wonder what the deeper value was for me here.

I’d always liked the idea of gardening and being a green thumb, but the reality of having to be outside doing it never appealed. Then it hit me, I didn’t want to be a compost hero! I just wanted to be more sustainable.

Sometimes, it can be easy to hyper fixate on the action that we can do. The thing that is right in front of us and is tangible. For example, sometimes we find it easier to just keep on working on a task to the point of burnout for the sake of saying we’ve done something, rather than taking accountability for ourselves by setting boundaries.

The passive time I had spent plopping a spring onion end into a glass and ultimately cleaning up all the feral end product could have been spent reading a book or finding other valuable resources about sustainability. I was actually distracting myself from the deeper value.

This month, I encourage you to dig a little deeper to see the core value within your interests. You might be surprised by what you find.

Food For Thought

"Happiness is not the absence of problems; it is the ability to deal with them"
— Steve Maraboli

"By doing a little bit each day you can get a lot accomplished."
— Gretchen Rubin

"Our biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand. We listen to reply."
— Stephen R. Covey