Sustainability is mindfulness #1

Oyuka Mun
Oyuka Mun
Nov 3 · 5 min read

caring is the new cool

P.S. this is not an article where I give you sustainability or mindfulness tips. just a dialogue about caring, starting with a boring story from my elementary school. you’ve been warned.

For a greater part of my life, I cared too much. or that’s what I was told. Up until the age of 11, I was an introvert with one best friend whom I spent essentially 75% of my life with. I know many can relate. For the other great part of my life, I learned to not care at all. then people told me I was like a robot and enquired whether I had feelings. Of course, I was deeply hurt by this and I still cared too much, yet I continued to pull the iron lady act. Then, fast forward to college when I started making conscious decisions whether to care, I was told I was emotionally handicapped (or the equivalent) by a person I admired as having the highest EQ and also cared too much.

You get the idea, I never got the hang of whether it was ok to care or not to care so I still come off as monumentally aggressive or intimidatingly apathetic.

Recently, I was reading Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk. He authored many how to books on what we consider trivial matters such as eating, communicating, relaxing, sitting, loving, and fighting, all while being mindful. What striked me in his book “How to eat” was this sentence: “A meal is an opportunity to show gratitude to those that came before us and those that will come after we are gone”. Which reminded me of this sentence in Jamie Cat Callan’s joie de vivre book: “In fact, you may find yourself exchanging a delightful conversation on the intricacies of how the soil plays an important role in the flavor of the wine and you introduce this man to the idea of terroir — how each wine carries with it the DNA of its own origins, its homeland, so to speak — the rocks and minerals and rain water and winds of its region”. Oh, terroir! By the way, this sentence is actually a conversation tip on picking up guys. Which is to say that we are attracted to the love of life, or we are attracted to mindfulness.

What’s so intriguing about this all is that, everything that we consider daily minutiae, someone has put their mind and hand and heart, and maybe soul to it. That meal you’re eating. This wine you’re drinking. The bed you sleep on. Those socks you’re wearing. The fragrance of the candles in the dim-lit jazz bar. Somebody has cared. Actually, somebodies have cared. The bread in your fridge which is left to rot, it was once a seed in a farmer’s hands. and before it got to your home, it was carried to the store by a person who snoozed his alarm clock 4 times to wake up at 5am to deliver your bread at 7. You know this, logically, that there are many behind this one bread… And suddenly, religious practices start making sense to me. I’m not a Christian and never will be. But I am somewhat spiritual and I understand why they say a prayer to God. If God is omnipotent, he is that seed and that person waking up at 5am and you. When you pray at a dinner table or to any food you’re consuming, you are paying your respect and gratitude, “to those who came before you and to those who will come after us”. To say, thank you to the farmer for working till his neck turned red, thank you to the wind and soil and sun and rains and snows, thank you to the seedling which summed up all its courage to break out of its shell and rise despite the weight and gravity and inertia of this earth, thank you to yeast, thank you those who created mills and cars and buildings, thank you for caring. and thank your parents and ancestors for giving you life just so that you, a feeble strawberry generation descendant gets to experience the energies of all this. This being the abundance of the life that’s offered to you.

Because we need this ourselves. I feel that whenever I’m writing up a report or a proposal, or pages of things which may never be consumed (because what you read and eat are one and the same, they both enter your body), I always wonder. Actually, that’s why I started reading these reports and books in whole. Somebody, like me, possibly better than me, spent late nights and quarreled with their loved ones over cooled dinners and dampened moods, just for or because of this report or pitch or books or an amalgamation of these work we justify by telling ourselves we make a difference. or whatever we tell ourselves really.

So this back thought, caring that somebody might’ve been killed in the process of making that H&M sweater you’re thinking of buying, that’s mindfulness. That’s caring. And when you live like this, that’s caring too much, actually. And that’s why we talk about sustainability. Because as cliche as it goes, there are a number of fucks you are given on this earth and most of us don’t spend it on thinking about the people who made this H&M sweater or that rotten bread in your fridge. We don’t care and consciously choose to remain ignorant, which has aided overpopulation and enabled corporations to commit inhumane crimes without real punishment. Because who would decide to bring more children into this world if they knew they were robbing other children of their food and future. Yet, we decided to remain ignorant, for millennia, and that’s why we have this issue now, that asks us to care, immensely. It’s exhausting to think about the lives behind all this. But our whole existence is dwindling and people are exhausted, because we haven’t cared when we should’ve and still should. When is a good time to care? When is a good time to bring up the elephant in the room? The answer is that it’s never.

We can, like this dog, melt away quite literally until we are swept off the face of the earth, with the history books on which you wanted your name so badly, all burnt to dust.

Or we can care.

You decide.

Oyuka Mun

Oyuka Mun

occasionally charming, brutally honest. here to express thoughts not write articles

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