On this Earth Day, I revisit my New Year’s Resolutions. It is four months into this year and I recognise the importance of the resolutions I made at the starting of this year. I believe in resolutions, I believe in them like I believe in keeping a planner; just as the planner keeps me on track, the resolutions help me improve that track. The thing with planners and resolutions both is, they become useless when you try to make them extraordinary. At this point, they stop working. The trick to making resolutions work is very simple: keep them achievable, do not make them for the sake of having New Year resolutions, rather make them because you want them to be the tools for improvement. Most importantly, keep them doable.

Most of the resolutions we make are often things that are personal and at times we don’t like speaking of them or sharing them. Yet I decided to make this one an announced resolution, for two reasons: it might help me to follow it, and secondly it is something we all need to practice.

So the resolution it is simply ‘Less is more!’ How does this phrase work? Isn’t less supposed to be less and more means more? Well, the idea is deeply rooted in being content with what we have (on a personal level) and that playing our role as an active citizen (on society’s level) to minimise excess and waste.

How does this work? Let me explain, there is a party at your friend’s place and you feel you have nothing to wear. Your mother reminds you of all the dresses you own and the possible ones you can wear to this party. You tell her that you have worn all these before and you want a new one. In reality, you just want a new dress despite having many and you do end up buying it, and it meets with the same fate of ending up in your cupboard without you wanting to wear it again.

Didn’t you just waste resources on something which was just a fancy? The same amount could have been saved for a gadget you really need or for a trip you wish to take with friends or anything else which is much more important than that one dress you won’t wear again.

Another example (which specifically applies to me), we keep on hoarding things, buying stuff which pleases our eyes and refuse to throw away the old things, giving excuses like we have memories attached with the particular item or it might come in future use. Yet, deep inside we know it is neither and out of habit we keep hoarding till we are out of space.

Results: our storage spaces are a clutter and we never find the right things at the right time. It is not wrong to keep memories, but we need to give away things and get rid of items which are of no use. When we keep what is important, we are doing a favour to ourselves by marking what really matters, hence less becomes more useful, more important, more valuable and even more memorable.

Let us also look it from the point of view of space management. Nobody likes messy spaces, cluttered desks and workspaces. Working in a cleaner, de-cluttered, organised space always helps in being more focused and productive. Having only the required things at hand allows us to navigate through our tasks efficiently.

Lastly, the importance of ‘less is more’ on the global scale. All the environment-friendly ways, the ideas of going green, the roots of reduce, recycle and reuse, lie ultimately at the heart of this phrase. Use less non-renewable energy, less harmful products, less of anything that harms our health or the planet’s health and we are on our way towards a healthier breathing space for ourselves.

‘We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children’, is a strong reminder of how this blue planet needs protection and all of us must play our roles in it. The only time when ‘less’ won’t simply work is in terms of trees and plants, we need to work towards a greener environment.

These are my thoughts, or words which need to be put into actions, because all good that matters eventually comes from fewer words and more actions.

Published in Dawn, Young World April 22nd, 2017