I'm getting it all wrong and that's OK

Tom Corneill

Tom is a writer, musician and watchmaker based in Bath. When not playing with words or watches you might find him in his daytime alter ego as an Investments Consultant. Follow on Instagram or Twitter @tomcorneill

I have thrown plastic drink bottles in the waste bin. I have sat in stationary traffic, alone in my diesel car for hours rather than use public transport because I couldn’t be bothered to wait for the bus.

I have flown short distances to save the few hours my journey would have taken by car. I have ordered a beef burger with beef chilli on top and huge amounts of side dishes knowing full well I wouldn’t be able to eat it all. And I have looked back at times in my life and sighed, heavily, at the things I’ve gotten wrong.

Do you go through life trying to be a good person but feel like you’re constantly making mistakes? You’re not alone. Whether in terms of relationships, a career, an exercise regime or your approach to ‘going green’, it’s quite possible that you’re actually leading a shining example while feeling like a total putz. Clearly I’ve been there. But I’m teaching myself the art of acceptance and forgiveness and it feels much healthier than ‘self-improvement through guilt’. Today I’ll talk about how this works in terms of trying to save the planet.

“I have looked back at times in my life and sighed, heavily, at the things I’ve gotten wrong.”

Here’s the thing: we’re brought up knowing that we should do right, not wrong, but then we’re set some pretty strange examples. When I was a child I thought – I just assumed – my parents were perfect. My Mum and Dad? The tallest, oldest, wisest creatures in my universe? Of course they’re right. Whatever they say or do, count me in. But each generation is the product of the culture and generation that came before them. They themselves were brought into a world that they thought must be ‘getting it right’. But the world before them and before us was less well-informed than it is right at this second or will be in two minutes’ time. Truth changes along with our understanding of the world and that means what was OK yesterday might not be OK tomorrow. Perhaps the best demonstration is the tobacco industry. By the time I was growing up my parents were getting around to accepting that smoking wasn’t good for you but they themselves had grown up surrounded by billboards telling you things like ‘more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette’ and ‘as your dentist I would recommend Viceroys’ and ‘more scientists and educators smoke Kent’. The evidence of links to cancer had been around for years but the indoctrination that takes place in your formative years can be unbelievably hard to escape and acceptance is not easy. I have the benefit of more years lived in a time where cigarette packets are adorned with tumours and corpses so it’s easier for me. But I don’t blame my parents for smoking around me when I was younger because they had a different starting point and eventually they had the courage to make the change and kick the habit.

And yes, I’ve always known that recycling is good but until recent years we didn’t have the barrage of anti-plastic messages that we do now, nor did we have the same facilities. I vaguely recollect the briefest of mentions that ‘it’s good to recycle’ in primary school but we were certainly never shown footage of whales choked by plastic bags or seabirds spewing up broken biros – thankfully we now get this every day and while it’s difficult to watch, it will make us better and in turn create a much better starting point for the next generation. So yes, in my life I have binned single-use straws and every other nasty you can think of but more importantly – I don’t do it anymore.

Tom gave up cow’s milk and now he’s working on cheese

As children we’re taught that milk comes from cows – it’s usually depicted by a little old farmer hand-milking Daisy, his lifelong bovine chum – and as late as 2018 that’s the image that I carried while guzzling the blue top stuff to get my protein fix. It wasn’t until recently I learned of the suffering inflicted on dairy cows; the psychological and physical damage caused to these surprisingly intelligent creatures by the mass production processes used in order to stock up the supermarket shelves. So I gave milk up too and now I’m working on cheese (an important side note here: fair play to those who can just drop habits like a bad, er, habit… but for me change is only truly effective if it’s sustainable and that sometimes mean phasing into it while I learn of the alternatives. Top Tip).

Giving things up isn’t easy; it’s really, really tough because it’s what you know and it’s what you love. You’re comforted by these things and you’ve lived a life where they were normal and wholesome. And because whole industries have been built around them sometimes it’s impossible to find alternatives (oh, the power of marketing). But doing the right thing is so often about taking the less easy path and once you’ve seen the truth you cannot unsee it. Beating yourself up though and holding onto guilt for the emissions you’ve generated and the sea life you may have damaged in the past is no good to anyone. A friend once told me that ‘regret is a dead emotion, it doesn’t change anything’ and they were right. In a world that scores higher than any point in history on depression, heaping on the guilt – to yourself or to those around you – isn’t going to change anything. On the contrary, if you’re going to save the world you need to be on top form. So if you’re making great changes but feeling suffocated by the crushing weight of your past errors, you probably need to give yourself a break.

This blog post does of course come with a caveat: if you know you’re getting it wrong and you’re not doing anything about it, that’s not OK. The point is that we are human and we get things wrong but we learn as we go. It’s in trying to be better next time that we can find acceptance, forgiveness and hope.

So this is me telling you that it’s OK to get it wrong. Many times in fact. Yes, most of us could do a little more but every so often you have to stop and acknowledge that as long as you’re trying, you’re part of the solution.