That regular habit...

I've never been a smoker but I remember, years ago, hearing of quitting cigarettes as a popular 'new year, new you' kind of focus for making a change. That was in the old world of my childhood where climate change wasn't a thing, but smoking in restaurants still was. Now, we're in the super-modern world where the New York Times publishes a piece full of comments from its readers on personal behaviors in their own lives they plan to change as a response to climate change.

I've decided that for me there is a particular area of habitual behavior in my own life that I want to use this New Years' energy to disrupt, and that is around the credit card I've had for years. Even though I've been aware that JP Morgan Chase is one of the top banks financing global fossil fuel development and I've thought about switching my card to one with another bank for awhile, I have easily convinced myself that I could do this some time in the future- since my little act would truthfully just be a symbolic one in terms of impact, & I have my payments set up & my 'reward points' and.. Really, I think it's like a lot of the structure of daily adult life: habits become like automated software updates that just run in the background.

Starting this one little change in my life- getting beyond my own excuses and figuring out what steps I need to do to make it happen- has been a good reminder of why we're all in such a predicament globally with climate change. Making a change to habits (or systems, structures, methods) does require a disruption of the status quo. And even though an individual making this kind of little habit change has zero direct relevance on the scale of change needed globally, I do think there is relevance to making the kind of personal habit changes that make us feel more aligned.