Living into the No Impact Week experiment. Though I have yet to read through the week’s instructions for going “no impact” starting Sunday, I have instinctively slowed down and made time to be quiet. A walk to the ocean during work hours, no after school playdate, no squeezing in phone calls. What has arisen during these moments of quiet and focus are strong sensations of discomfort and watching a mind quickly drawn back into thinking about consuming … something, anything.

Quiet on the beach. The ocean was as flat as I’ve ever seen it, waves casually flopping onto shore. I watched a butterfly struggle to avoid a tribe of seagulls, high tide and gusty wind to get up over the rocks to the beach roses and then cross the road. I did some quiet internal practice. Mostly, though, I contended with building a list of things to do and to buy, doing and buying that would basically make my life more comfortable. I was mildly successful at not analyzing my thinking, perhaps because I was so busy hoarding my tasks and gently caressing my attention back to something neutral, like the tired butterfly.

Being with the children all afternoon on my own. (Wow.) In my intuitive choice to hang at home and lay low together, I recognized how out of touch I am with my older daughter and how desperate I am to keep her occupied, by someone else. This has lead me to make serial playdates. In spite of my thinking we are not crowding our life with too much scheduled activities, I have instead consumed social connections. Anything not to be alone, with myself, with my high energy daughter.

Call it what it is, I am consuming, something, almost all of the time.

Next week will be a challenge for me. For sure reducing my carbon footprint in a sub-urban landscape with all kinds of material habits securely in place will be part of it. At the moment, though, I am most interested in my – formerly subtle – mental constructs of resistance, distancing, and avoidance, that show up as consuming and hoarding interactions. The only way I know how to unpack this is through silence and slow action. May the experiment begin.