Archive for April 2009
Plastic Bags Banned in Brisbane
Discarded plastic bags
As of April 2009 Brisbane International Airport became a plastic bag free zone giving the 4.1 million passengers who shop there each year an opportunity to be involved in a long term cultural change towards sustainability.
I was in Brisbane International Airport recently and discovered they have ceased using plastic bags in all shopping areas. As a result, and it’s only been in action since April, one million plastic shopping bags have-not been released out into the world. How does it get any better than this?
Who Owns All Those Plastic Bags?
Supermarkets and grocery stores often provide trolleys to assist shoppers in transporting purchases to their vehicles. In Australia, the business is responsible for any trolleys that their customers take off-site and send staff out into the streets to round them all up. Supermakets can get fined if their shopping trolleys are littering the streets.
Supermarkets also provide plastic bags so shoppers can manage their purchases. Shoppers don’t actually buy the plastic bags, they are provided by the businerss in the same way as the trolleys.
Shouldn’t businesses collect all of their plastic bags that they send out into the world?
Being Golf. An Unusual Possibility?
What if, by being golf, you had access to everything golf is?
If I ask you to be happy, you can actually do that in a flash, if your willing. And in that, you realise that it’s simply a choice – you choose to be happy or to be sad. When you choose to be happy, for example, you immediately have all of happiness available to you. You know exactly what happiness is and become that; no one has to teach you how to do it, you just get it and be it. It’s easy, just as it’s easy to be sad.
So, why doesn’t happiness last very long? It’s not that being happy doesn’t last long; it changes because you choose to be something else. You change what you’re being every 10 seconds. You think that if you make one choice it will last forever. No. A choice is only good for about 10 seconds and then you choose again. It follows, that to be happy all of the time you would have to choose it every 10 seconds. Seems like a lot of work!
You think that you can only be one thing at time, so you have to swap what your being to function. Could you actually be happy and sad at the same time? What would it take to be more?
To be happy and sad at the same time would require you to give up your definitions of what they are. You think that to be happy requires you to smile and laugh. Is that true or could you be happy without doing those things? Could you be happy without doing anything? Smiling and laughing is the way you prove your happiness to others; it has nothing to do with being … it’s a doing. Most of the time you DO and rarely, if ever, BE.
In golf, could you be a winner and lose? Yes; but only if you don’t have a definition of what winning and losing are. One definition of winning is, “the golfer with the lowest score” and if you don’t match that definition you cannot be a winner. What does it mean? Nothing. It’s just someones version of what a winner is. You don’t have to do anything with it.
I was playing golf recently and experimenting with asking a question before every shot. It was a lot of work and I realised I was ‘doing’ question. I got to the eighth and as I walked up to the tee realised that all I had to do was be the question and be golf. And in that, I already knew what was required. I didn’t have to work out every shot, I stood on the tee and just received all of the information that was available; it was like the eighth was speaking to me. There was absolutely nothing going on in my head and it left me totally free to create the shot. The drive flew down the fairway and with an easy six-iron I was three-feet from the pin. It was so easy and truly glorious to play that way.
Being golf is a choice. What choice are you avoiding by the choices you are making around golf? What are you refusing to be, that if you would be it would change everything?
