Why we should keep the January feeling going

We might spend February to mid-December battling one day at a time in our diaries, but as the end of the year approaches, my gaze lifts to a further horizon.

Through January, I manage to keep something of that perspective – like making the first footprints in fresh snow, I take each step mindfully, wondering whether this is the kind of trail I want to be making across virgin country, considering how my path will appear when I look back. Without such looking ahead, sustainable living makes no sense.

The only reason we would buy a more expensive, but energy-efficient light-bulb (available now in most electrical shops and supermarkets in Kosovo, by the way – no excuse if you’ve not already fitted them in your house) would be because we are looking long term.

We know that the up-front payment will be balanced by the eventual savings as the bulb lasts longer, uses less power.

Organizing our food shopping in advance means we don’t end up grabbing the cheapest import, the poorest quality; bothering to turn the television off stand-by involves a short-term grunt on getting up from the sofa but we know there is a long-term impact on our electricity bill and on the use of the earth’s resources.

So keeping and encouraging a long-term perspective is essential for an earth-friendly lifestyle. But how do you imagine the future? Not what do you imagine the future to be – we can all trade visions of communities living in silver space suits on hydroponically grown algae, or, alternatively, hair-shirted camps of low-carbon organic farmers.

I mean how do you imagine the future? As a slave to my diary, if you ask me about the future, I can see it rolling out before me in a series of MTWThFSS blocks. My visualization of time ahead is captured in that little notebook (so much so that I missed an appointment recently because my 2011 week-to-view diary has Thursday on the bottom left hand corner, while my 2010 week-to-view diary had it on the top right hand corner, I live my life as if I am crawling across that paper representation).

Ask me what’s going to be happening this year and I’ll mentally whip through those pages, seeing the blank spaces, and the inked-in plans, and the pencil scribbles.

Visual images of the future are culturally-specific. The Japanese, I am told, typically ‘see’ the future coming at them from behind their heads, making a fundamental connection between the past and the future.

My hunch is that people in Kosovo see the future as something less connected, less knowable. One of the things I love about Kosovo is the sense of opportunity, and I think that’s connected with not knowing – like driving through the recent Pristina fog, you can see what is just in front of you, but beyond that, anything is possible.

There is a fundamental truth in this understanding of time to come – however inked-in are my travel plans and expectations, things will happen to derail them (I came to Kosovo for six months and I’ve been here nearly five years). Kosovo’s history has encouraged this sense of not-knowing – life has been unpredictable here, not just ruled from outside, through repeated waves of violence and destruction, but also in the post-1999 period when UN missions and individual contracts have lived in a six-month cycle.

New reasons have confirmed a mindset already present in Kosovo, and newcomers to the country – whether British, Japanese, or from any of the other tens of countries represented here – have picked up some of these short-term ways of living.

It’s a threat to Kosovo’s sustainability – politically, economically, and environmentally. Talking to a Kosovar friend recently about energy use in Kosovo he told me ‘people here can’t afford to make energy savings’. In fact they can’t afford not to.

How long-term are you thinking, as you riffle through your 2011 diary, or speed the cursor through the Outlook calendar? Whether you’re a long-term Kosovo resident, or here on a short-term contract, how would your actions be different if you lived today as if you were going to be here forever? How would we be less wasteful, more respectful?

So my New Year’s resolution? To try to see the long-term implications – for the ecosystem and my place in it – of my short-term decisions. To try to keep something of my January perspective, as the virgin snow turns to slush, and eventually melts away.

Elizabeth Gowing is a founder member of The Ideas Partnership, a Kosovar NGO working on educational, cultural and environmental projects. She can be reached at theideaspartnership@gmail.com