Your physical body is important. Your surroundings are equally important for your overall well-being. That is why taking care of the environment is important as well.
Part of our regular routine before we go about the day’s work is to brush our teeth and clean our body from head to toe. We also put on fresh clothes, comb our hair and wear comfy footwear before we walk out the door. We take the effort to look pleasing to other people as well as to look pleasing to ourselves when we look at the mirror. However, most of us are in such a hurry to go about our day that we often neglect our surroundings. Taking care of the places in which we move our physical selves is equally important. It is the same as how we regularly take care of our bodies.
Your Home
When you wake up, do you tidy up your bed? Do you put your laundry neatly away? How about your dishes, do they pile up in the sink? Do you clean, organize and declutter your home often?
A clean and organized home is an important factor in keeping yourself healthy. Sure, a little mess here and there is acceptable. But if everything is disorganized, you cannot go about your daily life in a good mood. Remember that the state of your bed, is the state of your head. The state of your home is the state of your mind.
You start the day getting frustrated because you can’t find your shoes because of all the mess in your room. Then you end it with more frustration when you can’t find the remote to your TV at night. How do you think this will affect your mental state throughout the week, months and years?
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Start as soon as you wake up by tidying up your bed. Try to declutter and organizing the rooms in your house each day until the clutter is gone. Your goal is to have a more spacious, clean and comfortable home.
Your Work Place
Whether you work at home or in an office, a clean and organized work environment is essential for productivity. It is also needed to boost creativity. You may not be a able to control your whole office’s cleanliness and organization. However, your own desk should be a good example to your co-employees.
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Make sure to include tidying up your desk in your routine. In fact, make it the start and end or your work day. Before you work on anything, organize the materials on your desk, even your drawer. You can also organize the files on your computer. Organizing your files will prevent a cluttered desktop when you start your work and it’s easier to find your files.
Your Community
Your community is not just your immediate neighborhood but also the places that you go through as you travel to work or your destination for a vacation. Even in these places away from where you live and work, taking care of the environment is also important as it will impact your own home as well if you don’t keep it clean and healthy.
Think of a flood or a typhoon bringing back all the trash that were thrown into the river or ocean or a fire started by one uncaring camper who threw away a lit cigarette that burned a whole forest. These disastrous events could be prevented by just caring enough to keep the places we travel through and visit cleaner instead of dirtier.
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Take only memories and leave nothing but footprints. Adopt the policy of taking nothing and leaving nothing behind in the places you visit for your vacation, team building, or other travel adventures. Take as many photos as you can’t but leave the animals and plants alone. Don’t leave any of your trash or camping or swimming gear either. Take them with you when you leave and dispose of them properly when you get back home.
Your Planet
There is only one planet Earth and we should be taking care of it not only for our own sake but for the sake of our future children. The climate change is an important issue and everyone should do their part in being a solution to this problem.
When the earth is sick and polluted, human health is impossible… To heal ourselves we must heal our planet, and to heal our planet we must heal ourselves.
– Bobby McLeod (Aboriginal activist and poet)
Nature has its own way of cleaning up the planet and we should let it take its own course instead of exacerbating it by our careless habits. For example, wildfires are part of Australia’s natural environment but the recent forest fires have become worse and are happening at unexpected times so that even the animals in the forest were unprepared. Many animals have died and those living are now left homeless which also means that it will be harder for the animal population and the forest to recover. At the same time, it has raised temperatures in the residential areas up to 42 degrees Celsius.
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.
– Mahatma Gandhi (Indian and civil rights activist)
We can consider the drastic changes in weather patterns as the planet’s response to how we are not taking care of it properly. Plastics are polluting are oceans and killing marine life and unrecyclable (non-biodegradable) trash is multiplying with nowhere to go with landfills all filled to the brim. The summer heatwaves and delayed rainy season are just a manifestation of the worsening state of our global environment and we should do something about it before it’s too late.
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There are many ways to start helping the environment. The policy to REDUCE, REUSE and RECYCLE is good habit to practise especially in these times. However, you can add one more to that – REFUSE.
Refuse to contribute to anymore pollution in our environment and refuse to be just an onlooker from the sidelines. Instead, be a mindful resident of this planet.
Be mindful of the ways you can help in reducing the problems and be an active part of finding and advocating for sustainable solutions to keep our homes, community and our planet healthy and safe.
Photo by Evan Krause on Unsplash.