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Charity DOES Begin at Home

October 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Some time ago I was talking to a friend and the conversation turned to charity, and how much we both tend to give.

“I never give to charity”, they said “I don’t believe in it”.

I was a little taken aback.

My friend is a perfectly nice and amiable person, personally generous to their friends and not especially mean spirited. I’d never really come across anyone with such a hard view of charity before, and certainly wasn’t expecting it from my friend. It turns out my friend’s not unique, I’ve encountered others with the same view since.

People offer a range of reasons for their opposition to charity: “all the money gets wasted”, “people need to learn to look after themselves”, “I don’t have enough money myself”. I actually heard someone say “well its survival of the fittest isn’t it” when asked about developing world poverty once. Others seem to have broader and deeper issues, related to some form of hoarding instinct, or a genuine lack of emotional empathy for others, such as with Doctor Spock style Alexithymia. Recent research does suggests there may be a genetic component to generosity.

The most common reason that tends to be offered though is “I’ve never really thought about it”.

When it comes to charitable giving there’s a spectrum that ranges from cheerful and generous sacrificial giving, all the way to not believing in charity at all, passing through various shades of awkward guilt and lukewarm occasional support, in between.

Why ?

And of course it’s not just giving to charity, the same question arises with anything we do more for others than ourselves. Pay more for fairtrade – why ? Make less profit with an ethical investment account – why ? Pay more for green electricity – why ?

There are as many reasons given in support of empathy and compassion as against it – that it’s in the common good and makes things better for everyone, that it’s a requirement of an ethical code, that its a religious commandment or that its all down to mirror neurons.

The truth is, of course, that to a significant extent empathy and compassion are learned, especially in early childhood. Charity in later life, it seems, really does begin in the home.

We all tend to imitate what we see and what’s modeled for us when growing-up, and several developmental psychologists (including Sue Gerhardt) have stressed the importance of  a warm loving environment and relationships for developing empathy in children.

Fortunately, if you’ve left teaching (or learning) empathy a little late, all the indications are that it can also be successfully learned later in life. Many courses and training – whether for ex-prisoners trying manage anger, doctors improving their bedside manner or (of course) for marketing, now incorporate empathy development. The economist and activist Jeremy Rifkin believes the development of increased global empathy is what will ultimately save the world.

So more hugs all round then!

Similar articles – Saving Lives, From Hunter-Gatherers to Shopper-Borrowers, It’s Not the Thought that Counts

Photo by carnoodles, via Flickr

Filed Under: Ethical Lifestyle, Self-Development Tagged With: , ,

Play Nice and Share

October 16, 2011 By 5 Comments

A short post about food, on World Food Day (October 16th) – part of the Blog Action Day event.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”

- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (the original gourmet)

It’s often said that food is one of the few things that connects us all – from the skyscrapers of New York to the jungles of New Guinea.

Biology textbooks will tell you food is chemical energy and nutrients for our bodies; but our relationship with food is far more complicated than that.

Very few of us would even describe having a relationship with air, or even water, which are even more vital to our existence. Clearly food isn’t just chemical energy and nutrients; its emotional, social and cultural. The significance of food is interwoven through our societies from the top to the bottom – from state banquets to birthday parties, whether comforting home made soup for the family or microwave meals for one in a plastic tray. Jean Brillat-Savarin was right, what we eat is central to our lives, it does define who we are.

And not just individually, also as a species.

You’ve probably heard the mantra Half the world is overweight, while the other half starves.

It’s not that far from the truth.

Around a billion people are currently undernourished across the world, with 17,000 children dying from hunger every day. Another billion people have little food security, due to poverty.

At the same time a billion people in the world are overweight or obese, facing increased health risks and shorter lives as a result.

Unfortunately all the forecasts are for both statistics to worsen – with climate change, increasing fuel costs, water scarcity and rising population, alongside poorer quality diets, decreasing levels of physical exercise and increasingly westernised ways of eating in many parts of the developing world. The hungry look set to get hungrier, and the fat fatter!

Food doesn’t just connect us – it also divides us.

The problem isn’t scarcity, but policy, politics and a lack of compassion in the system.

There’s more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, we just need to get better at sharing it.

Similar articles – How Hungry are You Right Now ?, Live Below the Line, Wisdom vs Intelligence, Grow for Food Justice, Scrape Your Plate, Meet the Meat

Photo by lettorovication, via Flickr

Filed Under: Food & Farming Tagged With: , , ,

The Aral Sea

October 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

Before the 1980s the world’s fourth largest inland lake was the Aral Sea, on the border of  Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. At around 68,000 square kilometres, it was nearly the same size as Ireland, complete with thousands of islands, thriving fishing communities and the lakeside cities of Muynak and Aral’sk.

Buy the late 1960s huge amounts of water were being diverted from the Aral sea for the irrigation of Soviet cotton fields, which also continued in the post-Soviet era. By 2008 the Aral sea had largely disappeared, with less than 10% remaining, compared to its original size.

The rusting hulks of former fishing vessels now sit in the desert, miles from the nearest water.

Salinity in the water that remains has massively increased, and much of the surrounding area is badly affected by pollution from former agriculture and industry, with large dust storms also now common.

But since 2005 a limited recovery has been underway for the northern Sea area, following the construction of a new dam, with funding from the World Bank. Unfortunately no similar improvement is taking place in the south.

 

 Photo by Staecker, via Wikicommons

Filed Under: Pollution, Water Tagged With: , ,

Unsubscribe to Save Time, Stress, Waste & Money

October 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Guest post by Rachel Papworth – decluttering coach and blogger at Green & Tidy, helping people with WAY too much stuff declutter and create homes they love, homes that support them to lives the lives they want to live.

A crucial element of managing clutter is mindfulness: noticing how you use your things, how you move them around your home, how you use your home. And constantly tweaking how your home is set up so that it works efficiently for you.

On Clear Your Clutter, Stay Clutter-Free and Live the Life You Want, I recommend that you don’t just delete unwanted emails, you make a point of unsubscribing. And you don’t just put unwanted mail in the recycling, you contact the company that sent it to you and request to be removed from their mailing list.

Of course, this only relates to companies that you’ve dealt with in the past. Stop direct mail from companies that you haven’t dealt with by registering with the Mailing Preference Service.

After writing my last blog post, about noticing how far I applied my own coaching when I decluttered my loft, I became even more mindful than usual. And, one day, I noticed myself slipping an unread catalogue from Dell computers into the recycling bin in my mail-opening station.  I realised that action had become automatic. I bought a computer from Dell years ago and, ever since, every time they send me a catalogue, I put it straight in the recycling bin.

So I pulled the catalogue back out, found an email address on it and sent an email asking to be unsubscribed. Within two days, Dell mailed back to confirm my unsubscription request.

Then I got rigorous about cancelling unwanted stuff that arrives through my door. I’ve cancelled sales catalogues from organisations of which I’m a member, hard copies of programmes from local theatres and cinemas (especially those that email me weekly, I don’t need hard copies too), catalogues from companies I’ve bought stuff from in the past . . . no more unwanted catalogues, less paper being wasted and less for me to do. Plus less temptation to flick through the pages and buy more stuff !

It takes a couple of minutes to email or phone each company. Time that I’ll get back cumulatively as I save a few seconds each day, not picking up catalogues from the mat and putting them in the recycling. As we rely less and less on snail mail, and more and more on electronic communications, cutting out catalogues and marketing mail means that, some days, I receive no snail mail at all.

Speaking of electronic communications – I got rigorous with my email inbox too. I noticed how often I was scanning and then deleting mails consistently from the same organisations. Given that I recommend to others that they unsubscribe rather than just delete, I wondered why I wasn’t practising what I preached.

So I took a look. I noticed that the emails in question usually related to my other business, Papworth Research & Consultancy Ltd. And that I was choosing not to unsubscribe due to a fear of ‘missing out’. What if, sometime in the future, there was something useful in one of these emails? Plus I was anxious about why I wasn’t finding them useful? Was it because I was out of touch, unaware of what was currently important?

Once I’d identified these fears, it was easy to let them go. Sure there might be something that I’d find useful one time. It’s not likely though, given how many such emails I’ve scanned and deleted. And how crucial would it be anyway? If the information was essential to me, I’d come across it elsewhere.

As for feeling concerned that I didn’t find the emails useful or interesting, the fact that I don’t is just an indication that they’re not relevant to the bits of my work that I’m passionate about. No-one’s interested, or an expert, in every aspect of their field. And trying to be is a surefire way to lose business, since you won’t be able to bring enough energy or knowledge to any one area.

Since then I’ve been clicking the unsubscribe link in emails, unsubscribing from groups on LinkedIn and other networks and altering my email preferences on a variety of websites.

Again, this takes a little time. Not only will I get the time back though, as I don’t have to deal with unecessary emails, I’ve also noticed a reduction in stress – both because there are fewer emails for me to deal with altogether, and because I receive fewer emails which trigger a sense that I should be finding them useful.

Join me in unsubscribing.

Rachel Papworth runs Green and Tidy. She helps people with WAY too much stuff declutter, and create homes they love, homes that support them in the lives they want to live. Rachel is a trained coach, with a degree in psychology, and self-obsessed decluttering and organising geek, she loves the way decluttering your mind and your stuff is interlinked and the contribution decluttering makes to living a low-impact life. For more tips on having a home that supports the life you want, subscribe to her blog at Green and Tidy, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Photo by Charles Williams, via Flickr

Filed Under: Simple Lifestyle, Waste & Recycling Tagged With: , , ,

Not Enough Hours in the Day

October 10, 2011 By 2 Comments

In 2002 the marketing consultant Bill Geist invented a new phrase: time poverty.

Time poverty is the sense of not having enough available time to do everything you want, of constantly rushing to meet looming deadlines, and being overloaded with things to do, coupled with a general anxiety and guilt because you know you’re always too busy, and aren’t spending enough time with your friends and family, exercising, relaxing or even enjoying yourself.

Sound familiar ?

Do you remember that new technology was meant to make us more efficient and give us all more free time. Instead somehow we’ve shifted our expectations, and the constant ability to do work and endless opportunities and choices available to us have made us strive to do even more, over scheduling our lives as a result. We take work home, we run from one appointment to the next – always late, we try to cram more and more into every moment – multi-tasking ruthlessly. Yet whatever we’re doing, part of our brain always seems to be contemplating whatever it is we’re not doing.

We belong to the most productive and efficient civilization the world has ever seen – but many of us are simply struggling to juggle all the things we feel we should be doing in our lives. It’s easy to find news stories like children being too busy to play, voters too busy to vote, Christians too busy to pray, or nurses too busy to nurse.

In the rich world most of us don’t have to face the harsh realities of extreme poverty that exist for many in the poor world – our fundamental material needs of food, clean water and shelter are generally met. Nevertheless our societies struggle to be happy, with poor diets, increasing levels of obesity and diabetes, stress and exhaustion, sleep disorders, guilt, depression, isolation, alcoholism and other addictions – the so called diseases of affluence. In addition our families, our social institutions and our community cohesion is suffering as we simply struggle to find enough time to engage. Even if we find the time, we all too often can’t summon up the energy!

Of course this is a problem entirely of our own making – we’ve chosen to lead such busy lives.

Time is not a resource – we all have the same amount available. We cannot spend it, save it, use it or waste it. To quote Douglas Adams; “time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so”.

Paradoxically the oft quoted solution to the problem of time poverty – becoming more efficient, having more lists, being better organised, using the latest technology more effectively, not only doesn’t work, but actually adds to our sense of time pressure! Completing tasks in as short as time as possible is obviously a worthy objective, but if we tend to simply refill our to do lists with more tasks as a result, we’ve simply maintained or increased the pressure on ourselves.

It’s obviously easier to say it than do it, but to overcome the stresses of time poverty we must simply do less and reclaim more of our time from our ‘to-do’ lists.

One way to start is by making a don’t-do-list – to identify and challenge all the things you’re currently doing, with the aim of de-cluttering your life. Only keep what you’re passionate about – or what is so essential to your life it’s not negotiable (and very few things are).

A few ideas:

  • Delegate or pass-on as much as you can, and then ‘let go’ the responsibility for it,
  • Stop trying to make everything perfect,
  • Stop doing things that used to be a good idea if they no longer are,
  • Stop doing things you are doing only through pride, insecurity, status anxiety, guilt or habit,
  • Stop spending time processing ‘junk inputs’, use filters to remove unwanted emails, post, phone calls, texts and social media messages, don’t watch TV programmes just because they’re on,
  • Stop procrastinating, just focus on completing the task in hand. Actively remove distractions to help increase your concentration (like closing down Facebook, Twitter etc open on your browser),
  • Stop rerunning past events, or pointlessly worrying about things in the future you can’t control.

Once again Zen Habits has some good advice.

For inspiration watch the video on the left – if you just want a laugh watch the one on the right.

 

RELATED ARTICLES – Time Management Doesn’t Exist

Photo by deflam, via Flickr

Filed Under: Self-Development, Simple Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,
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