How to Live Your Life With Purpose
Living Sustainability in Your Life
Survival is optional. It is not a right. A personal life strategy with a sustainability purpose is a necessity, not an optional utopian ideal. The notion of sustainability should be central to every personal decision you make at work, play or life. The various humanity and life crisis, not least the covid19 pandemic, create tremendous opportunities to build a personal strategy of sustainability at the core of your life.
Sustainability refers to our capability and capacity to live continually at a comfortable and affordable standard of living for our children and their grandchildren. Sustainability has a much bigger and wider scope because it involves every dimension of the human bio-ecosystem: social, economic, cultural and natural. It is the enduring capacity for the biosphere and human communities to coexist. Individuals cannot therefore escape the social, economic, cultural and environmental impact of their behavior.
Sustainability has four major components, namely, social, environmental, cultural and economic. The components are inter-related. The ultimate Goal of sustainability is to save the planet, create prosperity, nourish the people, foster peace and enhance partnership. These are also articulated by the 17 sustainable development goals (SDG) of the United Nations (UN).
Many of the SDGs focus on the importance of environmental sustainability. The urgency to conserve and rehabilitate Planet Earth reflects the inevitability of imminent disastrous climate change resulting from indiscriminate past and current human development activities. The United Nations have also officially named 2020–2030 The UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration.
HOW TO CREATE A PERSONAL LIFE ODYSSEY WITH SUSTAINABILITY
Commit yourself, your loved ones and those within/outside your sphere of influence to conduct your lives with a sustainability purpose.
To start living with a sustainability purpose, pick one of the SDGs issues that matches your basic interest or concern. Contact me should you need assistance to connect to any persons, groups or organisations who are advocating your interest or concern. There is no one who cannot find a role to make an impact in the sustainable development process.
My personal odyssey into sustainability over the past 25 years has been an awesome wonderful journey to many parts of the world on various conferences and projects, meeting numerous talented like-minded professionals and helpers to leave indelible marks on the communities we supported and the agencies whom we partnered and worked with. The business created included renewable energy, green buildings, eco-townships, electric vehicles and sustainability.
Living with sustainability purpose describes an advocacy and action-based lifestyle that basically facilitates, promotes and reduces human environmental footprint and handprint even as we conserve our personal and societal use of Earth’s natural resources. Alone, it can however be daunting especially when you see that others around you are not doing the same. Remember that you are not alone, trust me. Your life with a sustainability purpose has persuasive powers as you join millions of others around the world who have dedicated themselves to making a similar impactful difference.
They too have realized that green alone is not broad enough or sufficient platform to support true sustainability purpose without embracing other social, economic and cultural issues as defined by the SDGs. Decide to become NOW the transformational change that you hope or seek to happen.
Sustainability Mindfulness in a Connected Universe
We must learn to do more with less, and wage a relentless war on fossil fuels even as we navigate the narrow pathways to a sustainable future. We must treat fossil fuels as a short-term expediency and develop or invent eco-efficient methods of providing energy, managing wastes and making things.
Be mindful that we are living in a connected universe and within a common existential eco-system where everything is connected to everything else. From food to waste, everything must go somewhere in a circular economy and Nature knows best that “there ain’t such a thing as a free lunch or anything”. We are paying for those “free” lunches with real human suffering in the 17 SDG areas.
Sustainability mindfulness is grounded on our consciousness to align thought and behavior about the consequences of connectedness. Sustainability mindfulness produces positive energy outflows as we engage and embrace the constant stress in our daily life resulting from the imbalance of resource allocation.
The above diagram provides a compass showing the 12 inter-related areas of sustainability engagement for a holistic life purpose.
Mindfulness cultivates in people the instinctive habit to continuously evaluate, assess and improve on any and all the SDG areas. By asking “what/how am I doing in the specific area or dimension?” and engaging in relationships and conversations to inspire and impact others, we energise and generate a profound sense of purpose to enhance optimism and sharpen focus as we embolden, empower and collaborate together towards our sustainable future.
Learning enhances sustainability mindfulness. It expands your self-awareness as you imagine the many possible sustainability futures unpacked by the successful engagement of the SDGs.
Eventually, self-mastery from continuous learning results in sustainability becoming you as the mindfulness process integrates your mind, body and soul with human relationships to create conscious reality-learning through “knowing what you think when you see what you say”. You will believe that what you do matters, become more engaged and improve your overall optimism and resilience to go the extra kilometer to create lasting transformational change towards sustainability.
When you embrace sustainability purpose in your life, the future is what is happening and not what will happen. Your visionary horizons will encompass the possible wonderful futures that you can plan strategically to achieve by dealing with and overcoming man-made obstacles that block the creation of natural harmony and happiness in personal, social and community life for a better future society on Mother Earth for you, your loved ones, your children and grandchildren.
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