I continually contemplate what is sustainable. It is an engrained natural attitude that is as second nature as wearing shoes when I travel away from home. But, like wearing a pair of shoes beyond their lifespan and then developing foot pain, I don’t always do what’s in my best interest. Amazon is an essential service in my life that offers things that are not easily acquired within 15 miles of where I live, and so being cognizant of the environmental impact of the packaging material, I allow the number of items in a shopping cart to collect, so what might have required 3 or 4 trips to various places in my car, I can have delivered as one larger bulk of items. Part of me can justify this use of Amazon because I also know that their vehicle will be delivering multiple packages to the neighbors in our apartment complex. We live in an apartment of 836 square feet because the two of us do not require a 1,600-square-foot home. Certain foods I buy in bulk if they are perishable but can be frozen, we have a vacuum sealer to extend their fresh date, or if I’m purchasing ingredients for making my cereal, I buy them online, typically from a family farm that will send me 8 to 10 pounds of the nuts or seeds I require. Our air-conditioning is never set to cold but hovers around 78 in the summer and 64 in the winter. Our car is a hybrid that offers us a wonderful 47 miles per gallon, and if an electric car offered us 500 miles of range, we’d rather own that.

I fail to present a reusable cup at the coffee shop; I’m still using plastic bags at the grocery and justify them because we need trash bags. I feel horrible when we replace car tires or change the oil as they are ugly reminders that we produce far too much waste, but we live somewhere that has a horrible public transport system that often acts as an air-conditioned homeless person shelter on wheels. We travel too much, which uses a lot of gasoline and then requires others to use natural resources to clean up after we’ve used motels, dishes, and various other services that produce waste. On the other hand, neither Caroline nor I buy much in the way of clothes; even our underwear becomes an embarrassment as we try to maximize their use.

But there are very selfish reasons for our mindfulness about sustainable practices: frugality breeds a kind of luxury that we thrive with. The reward for consuming less is found in our travels and ability to live experiential lives. We are not easily entertained by pop culture as it’s known by the masses; we need books, tools for making music, fabric, socks, and art. Those things can easily be tied into our travels as Caroline reads to me in the car as we drive along while on occasion, I have brought an instrument with me, and at a minimum, I have my computer that has a ton of music software for me to doodle with if I weren’t so busy working on photos and writing. Caroline is never far from knitting needles or a small drop spindle used for making yarn. If you could look at our search histories, you’d see a near-daily search for definitions of words, their etymology, the history of a place or thing, or following a literary reference of something we don’t know about, so our phones are most often used as tools to enrich our lives.

The less we waste, the more empowered we feel walking down a beach.