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?

Five Steps To Change The World

First, let me give credit to Steve Bowman for his article called, “Five steps to operating in a financial crisis – Expert advice for NGOs,” from which I have adapted the five steps underpinning his excellent work. In the article, Mr. Bowman lays out, “… five of the most important things [business] can do … in the current financial environment.” In my article below, I have extrapolated on his expert recommendations and applied these steps to changing the world; another fast growing crisis.

Five Steps To Change The World

1. Look at everything you’ve assumed you have gotten right

There is a philosophy, which encourages business, organisations and individuals to be consistently on the creative edge, constantly innovating and changing, far in advance of their competition. Its easy and simply says,

“Always be in question.“

The moment you decide you have something right or have the answer, every other possibility that was available to you disappears from view.”

Any business declaring they have it right is immediately in decline, because from that point-of-view they will stop creating, innovating and cannot have anything greater show up. The same applies to individuals, governments and mankind. Businesses constantly in question, generate possibility, choice and opportunity.

If Hoover had been more in question, perhaps they would have invented the revolutionary ‘cyclone’ technology that allowed James Dyson to seize market share in the eighties with his bagless vacuum cleaner.

As a powerful and influential force on Planet Earth, when we decide our model of society and life is the right one, it has an enormous effect. And from within that decision, we are unable to see where it doesn’t work or that something else is even possible. The current intensity-of-struggle to survive LIFE, clearly highlighted by the financial crisis, an increasing incidence of disease, pollution, global warming and other results, indicates we’ve been in decline for some time.

The reality is that many aspects of our lives do not work. The most glaringly obvious sign of this is the highly-stressed and fast-failing systems of Earth, for which a plethora of documentaries, films, scientists, studies and reports provide a mountain of evidence. Yet despite this, the majority of mankind appears blind. We seem to administer to LIFE from a false sense of superiority, based on the ‘rightness’ of our point-of-view. How did we become unconscious of what is, and so chronically blinded to what else is possible?

To begin to have a different perspective, we must look at what we have decided we have right, acknowledge where it’s not working and be willing to choose something different. And then most importantly … to actually choose!

The difficulty is that our habit is to choose the same thing, over and over, thinking that because the wrapping looks different, it must be a different choice. It isn’t.

What if we had gotten everything wrong up to now and all we have to do is acknowledge that … and change it?