What am I doing?

What  exactly am I doing? Where am I going? What am I trying to achieve?

I am sat here, tired, with a headache. My house is a mess. My kids are playing upstairs on their own, when I should be inter-acting or making some wonderful craft with them. I have a pile of jeans that need patching, and projects that I want to make a start on. But here I am, blogging. Always blogging. And e-mailing. And tweeting.

And what is it achieving?

Both for me and my family and on a wider scale too.

Yes, My Make Do and Mend Year has undoubtedly changed the way we approach buying, what we buy, and our consumption in general, but I could have achieved that without blogging about it, and saved myself a whole heap of time and bucketfuls of energy.

Yes, My Make Do and Mend Year has some very loyal and lovely and supportive readers, but I don’t know if it has changed anyone’s buying habits, and even if it has, changing the buying habits of one or two people isn’t going to save the world.

I have met some lovely  and inspiring people, both on-line and in real life, and I wouldn’t have not done it for a minute, but it is hard to keep finding the time and the energy to get the blog and the message out there, and at the end of the year, what will it have achieved?

On a personal level, I need to pay the bills. Maybe the energy and time that I have put into My Make Do and Mend Year would have been better channelled into a part-time job? I keep hoping for some marvellous way of making money from spouting on about living a sustainable life to drop from the sky into my lap, but in all reality that really isn’t going to happen.

On a wider level, my little blog is not going to change the world. And if you read most of the reports in the papers, there is now very little we can do to save the world. We have sleep-walked into a disaster, and there is probably no way back to the way we have it now. Our children will not be able to lead the lives that we do. And most certainly, our grand-children won’t. I firmly believe that as individuals, we all have an obligation to do what we can, and to live the most sustainable lives we can. But until we ALL start doing it, and like NOW, I sometimes feel like it is a very futile exercise.

I’m still not quite sure why I started the blog. I know it was about a desire for ‘less stuff’ and for our children not to grow up as mindless consumers, but as it has gone on, it has grown clearer and clearer to me, that what I really want is to show people how they carry on living their ‘normal lives’ but make them hugely more sustainable by just stopping to think a little bit. But unless that message can get out there and ‘sustainable  living’ becomes mainstream, then it will never work.

And I still won’t have paid my bills.

Sorry for all the navel gazing and whining. I guess I’m just having a bad day.

Tomorrow will be better. Promise.