My friend Charles Townsend lost his 28-year old sister in an accident that nobody was prepared for.  Lauren Huddleston died doing what she loved.  While running on Katy Trail in Dallas last Friday, she collided with a bicyclist.  She was taken to the hospital but could not survive her injuries. 

I did not know Lauren but we have a lot in common.  We went to the same university and both worked for the same firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers.  Charles told me that thanks to a co-worker from PwC who happened to be running along the same trail, Lauren was identified immediately.   This gave her family time to get to the hospital and make the necessary arrangements for Lauren to share her organs with so many others, something she had always wanted to do.

So I’ve been doing this green thing in earnest for five years.  At a rate of 4 hours per day (some days more, a few days a little less), 6 times per week, 52 weeks per year, I’ve logged 1,248 hours per year.  Multiplied by five years, that equals 6,240 hours. I didn’t subtract vacation time because I took none.  

So where has it brought me? 

 So far, I am drawing the returns of time well spent: steady client work, a book, interviews/mentions/opinions across far-flung media channels, TV spots, etc.  Five more years of this almost guarantees an international stage.  This is not an opinion, at least not my opinion.

After spending five years in sustainability consulting, I’ve learned to stress the simplicity of going green.  “Don’t make it too complicated.  Distill it into sound bites.  Play up the benefits.  Minimize the hurdles.  Make it seem easy.”  So goes the conventional wisdom in green marketing.  The idea behind this, of course, is to sell people on change when their natural inclination is to resist it. But even as I continue down this path, a question keeps nagging me.

When did sacrifice become a bad thing?

Each year I vow to make Christmas a little less extravagant.  Of course, any amount of scaling back would be an improvement over last year’s craziness.   I still remember the wave of nausea coming over me as I watched our toddlers rip through the pile of presents like a pair of sharks in a feeding frenzy.  Good intentions aside, overshopping proved to be too hard a habit to break. The thing is, our kids didn’t ask for it. In fact, they had been scared of Santa Claus and confused by the bizarre ritual of opening presents, not to mention the meaning of the holiday itself.  We had bought them all that stuff because in America, of course, stuff equals love.

I am a year older (and wiser) now.  So are Jordan and Ryan. They aren’t so scared of Santa Claus, and have even managed to ask him for a few things.  Their simple requests include a music box, a storybook, and a toy train.  I practically wept with joy when I saw this – but then it dawned on me.   As early as next year, those lists could include an iPod, a Wii, and other tech devices that I don’t even know how to use.  Christmas is never going to be this simple again, is it?