Some alternative advice about writing…

Spoiler alert, I’m going to talk about money.

Now that’s out the way, let’s get back to the writing.

People start writing for many different reasons. Some for fame and others for fortune or as a way to make sense of life.

Whatever the reasons you may have for writing. One thing we all have in common is that writing is intimidating.

What do you write about and when?

Do you publish?

What tools do you use?

What platforms are the best to use?

There are so many questions you can ask yourself before you even sit down to write.

Here is the thing though. All that you need, to be able to start writing is inside of you.

If your unsure of the best place to start, pick up a pen and paper. A diary or journal is a great place to start.

It’s a private place to get your thoughts down onto paper. It’s also a great place to start playing around with sentence structure and wording. If you find then that writing is for you, then are plenty of ways to expand.

Whether you decide you want to write a book or share your life and ideas. Then online is a place you will want to be.

Personally, I have a blog and also write on Medium. That gives me the confidence to continue publishing my work.

If you want to write for the public then that’s a big thing to get out of the way. Knowing you will be able to hit the publish button each time is key.

What you write and how often you write? Well, again there is no correct answer here. Except to say that what works for you is best.

The last thing I would say is that with good writing comes editing.

The two tools I use are Hemmingway and Grammarly. Both are free to use.

Hemmingway helps me to keep my writing simple. Grammarly helps me with my spelling and grammar.

Over time both of these tools have helped me to learn and improve.

There are so much advice and self-help out there for us writers. It can all be a bit confusing.

The main thing is to keep going at the pace and with the format that works for you!

The sweetness of reaping what you sow…

Last week I wrote about the garden becoming a small pleasure for my partner and I during all of this upheaval in our lives.The Simple Life — Gardening Our Secret PleasureWhether you have limited room in an apartment or balconymedium.com

What I didn’t write about though, was the best part of growing all this stuff.

Harvesting what we have grown. Enjoying food we grew ourselves and trying new ideas.

Again whether you have a small growing box in an apartment or you have a garden. The limits are those you set yourself.

We are lucky we have a few fruit trees and enough room to grow a lot of veg.

We have cherries, apricots, strawberries’, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes all doing their thing.

The summer started with the strawberries. Now we are onto the cherries and apricots. Soon enough they will be gone and the tomatoes will take center stage.

We also have a few vines which we rescued in spring. If we are lucky we will have some grapes this year as well.

Despite the harsh winters in Central Asia, we get about 6 months of the year where we can enjoy the garden.

The simple life

Life is full of pressure, stress, and uncertainty. Modern life takes a toll on us that’s for sure.

I get to spend an hour a day outside with no distractions. At that time right now when I’m picking our fruit. It feels like an eternity.

I can breathe, I can think, I can enjoy the silence.

It’s my time uninterrupted by social media, by email or WhatsApp or anything else.

There is a joy and freedom in that time that’s hard to express.

Is this the 1920s or the 2020s???

I’m so used to going and buying what we need. When you pick what you grow the options are endless.

In the last few weeks, we have been enjoying our produce.

Jams, fruit juices, pies, preserved fruit. These are things we have been able to make ourselves.

I can see why in the past people took so much pride in what they could make themselves. It’s simple, fun and the pride of making it yourself makes the end product taste much sweeter.

There is also an opportunity to learn new skills. Anything from pasteurization to making Kilner jar mechanisms and seals.

Its been great fun.

It brings us back to the circular economy our grandparents knew

One cherry tree, for example, is going to produce more cherries than you could ever want.

Trust me, we are over cherries. Next week I can guarantee I’ll say the same thing about apricots.

What we can’t or won’t preserve is given to friends. It’s great, in return we get some beers, or some volunteers to come to help us out.

Young kids of friends and family get to see and taste nature in action.

No money passes hands and why should it. This is about sharing what we have with each other.

What’s next?

For us next on the horizon it’s the turn of the vegetables. If we are lucky we may also see some grapes.

Other than that it’s just continuing to learn.

Maybe we will make some more room for planting as we are maxed out at the moment.

Other than that, the plan is to enjoy this time.

If we hadn’t been stuck at home so long this year. The garden would have remained a place to sunbathe.

Today its a sanctuary to work, learn and relax in.

Maybe we will make some more room for planting as we are maxed out at the moment.

Other than that, the plan is to enjoy this time.

If we hadn’t been stuck at home so long this year. The garden would have remained a place to sunbathe.

Today its a sanctuary to work, learn and relax in.

What more could we ask of life?

New definition, ancient practice

The definition of a circular economy today is:

An economic system that aims to reduce waste and promote the continual reuse of materials.

That’s a difficult sentence to digest huh?

The reason is simple. The world of capital investment has taken a concept as old as time and given it a name tag and a shiny suit.

In reality when its stripped back the circular economy is:

Reusing and recycling anything designed for one use into something different.

Today there are some great examples of the circular economy in action.

The folks buying and selling vintage clothes. Anything made from recycled materials. The trend for “upcycled” furniture etc.

These are all great examples of the circular economy.

It’s not something new

In the recent past, this was the way of life. Anything and everything was reused and recycled.

The term recycled wasn’t used of course, but that’s what was happening.

Clothes, toys, and books passed down between siblings and relatives. Yeah, that’s the concept in action.

If you ever sent time with grandparents who never threw anything out. They were living by the concept also.

What changed?

As we became richer in the ’60s and ’70s, the world moved to the globalized model that it runs on today. We had disposable income.

Once we had disposable income, the world got smaller. We could travel cheaply and so could consumer goods.

Even expensive luxuries like consumer electronics became throw away items.

By the turn of the 21st century, the circular economy was gone. We had become a throw-away society.

20 years later things are changing again

We have come to realize that the values of re-use and recycle so important to our grandparent’s are important to us.

It’s not some grand financial philosophy, it’s simply doing more with what we have.

The more we re-use and recycle our plastic products, for example, the less waste we produce. The less plastic we use the less we spend on those products.

The less waste we generate the lower the cost of clean up and disposal. This is just one example but its a powerful one.

Next time you read about the new and exciting circular economy. Remember its an old and powerful friend.

All we have done is redress it in a new and shiny suit.

The hidden cost of our bottled water addiction

Plastic

Most of us in 2020, are aware of the issues.

There is more and more plastic waste each year. The majority is never recycled.

Most of think of those things that hit the news. Plastic bags, food packaging, and Styrofoam cups for example.

There is a much bigger contributor to this issue, one that is never considered.

Bottled water.

There are over 50 billion 1 liter bottles of water sold each year globally.

That’s a huge amount of plastic waste. I get it, in lots of places either the tap water is unsafe, or confidence in it is low.

Consuming bottled water in 1-liter bottles, while convenient is killing the environment.

So what’s the solution?

It depends on where in the world you are.

Bottled water will never go away. There simply isn’t access to clean drinking water for us all at the source.

But if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with clean and safe drinking water. I’ll use Scotland as an example. Why would you pay for water that comes from the same place as the stuff coming out of your tap?

The sad fact remains that most of those 50 billion bottles consumed are by people with no access to safe water.

One solution is, we increase water carrier size to 3 gallons or 13.5 liters and make those returnable for reuse.

If we did that then the total amount of plastic bottles required would reduce by over 90% to 3.7 billion.

Those same bottles can be recycled material. They can also be reused many times.

If we adopted this strategy. We could avoid one of the real issues in the environment today which is becoming harder to solve each year.

Water is the stuff of life. It’s essential for our survival.

The issue is that because we have to package water to be consumed outside of the tap water system, we create waste.

Plastic waste in the environment is a growing issue. There are some solutions to it. But what always surprises me are some of the hidden causes.

Bottled water is a great example of that!

Humans solve problems, we adapt and we change. We solved the water problem for a lot of the world, the next step is to solve the plastic waste issue that comes with it.