An old soul once told to me to “live in the moment”. Easy for them to say, I thought.

After all, if you believe in reincarnation, this might be the old soul’s last trip but my first.

I replied that I had attempted but was not successful. The old soul’s suggestion was, rather than attempt to live the entire day “in the moment”, why not start by finding pockets of time in the day within which I could l try it out.

I’m finding it is not so hard to do, now that I have a much better understanding & focus. The more difficult part was remembering the advice, as decades of trying to think ahead & negativity are not easily overcome.

What I am going to add to this new found outlook is to attempt to turn the negative to a positive.

Say we don’t enjoy going to the gym or what we do for a living. An hour into the chore, we remind ourselves of how many more hours we still have left of this particular chore & reinforce the negative feelings associated with it.

Well what if we look at the days events as accomplishments instead. So we could say, “I’ve accomplished 1 hour of workout already”, or, “I may not have been able to get what I want for my car but I did manage to sell it”.

Instead of complaining about the horrible time we had while visiting whoever over the weekend, we can be thankful to be back in our own comfortable surroundings & bed, now.And if you find your frustrations however mounting, tell yourself that old adage “Change is the only constant. This too shall pass”.

So the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was a failure.

As usual, we would just love to point the finger & put the blame on someone or something. So let’s go down the list then, shall we?

We can’t blame God for the predicament that we’re in (for those who believe in God). So do we blame the leaders of the biggest emitters? The emerging countries? The actual companies? Or who?

Well, how about ourselves? That’s right. Ourselves. We as consumers & voters have always had the power to change things.

If you are unhappy with our corrupt governments & their mismanagement of our tax dollars, environmental laws, food safety, water pollution, etc., as they continue to pay homage to the oil & gas and the pharmaceutical sectors and unions, we have the power to put the Green party in power to reverse all of that.

If we don’t believe that change to the above mentioned issues can take place soon enough as they are lobbied by the lobby-groups & opposition, then we can change our consumption behaviour.

We can get rid of that gas guzzler, carpool or take the public transportation. We can live in a smaller house, replace that lawn, lawn mower, weed whacker & leaf blower with a flower & herb garden.

We can reduce our dependence on pharmaceutical prescription drugs & hormones which end-up in our  water supplies & ruin the eco-systems. We encourage & purchase organic vs. genetically modified…….

So, I ask you, who’s really to blame for the summit’s failure?