Through the recent course material, I have begun to think about my everyday life and how I have been conditioned to believe everything is alright in the world. Every day we are taught that it will work itself out and that we don’t need to worry about it. Meanwhile we dump millions of pounds of trash, use countless pieces of paper, run the energy bill up, and throw plastic away. Each of these acts contribute to the downfall of the environment. We must be taught separately how to be environmentally friendly and work excessively hard to do so. There are only a few courses that actually teach the importance of saving the environment and how we could live sustainably. I am lucky enough to be in a major that sustainability is at the forefront and encourages each student to think and design towards what is most sustainable. Beyond just the sustainability of the Earth, we especially forget about people. Living in the United States conditions its people into believing we are the best and there’s nothing that can stop us. We live our happy lives with plenty of park space, plenty of nature to enjoy, but we forget about the countries that we use as primary imports that don’t have this luxury. We get caught up in our own luxuries and forget about the thousands of people that we let mine, harvest, and produce our materials from their own natural resources so that we can keep ours. We are directly impacting countries that aren’t as developed as us to “help” them develop to better countries. This will not be the case if we let them continue to use up their resources just to ship them away. We must take advantage of all the items we throw away every day and begin to recycle them to produce our own supplies. This will indeed take business out of these countries, but may encourage them to develop themselves to a point where they can keep their environment and help citizens live better lives. My mindfulness activities this week have including more sketching and drawing to take my mind off the crazy world around me. I have been quarantined for the past two weeks and it seems it would be easy to have time to yourself to practice mindfulness, however it is quite the opposite. The time alone is spent on our phones and distracting ourselves from our mind. We no longer contain the ability to just sit and think. It’s okay to be bored and rely on our own thoughts to entertain us in the means of reflectance. Practicing mindfulness each day helped me through quarantine and encouraged me to be a better version of myself while I was working on homework.