I pull of a sheet of kitchen paper from the roll. Just the one sheet. I fold it carefully in half and wipe the sooty deposit from the bottom of a saucepan before placing the pan back in the cupboard. Cooking on bottled gas - filthy stuff. Were I to wipe this with a cloth, the cloth would be blackened in no time, the soot won't wash out. So kitchen paper it is. But - waste not, want not.
As I wiped the soot off the bottom of the pan, I unfolded it, and folded back the other way, revealing two more sides of unblackened surface, with which to give the pan a final rubdown. But there's still one clean side - so I use it to wipe down the window sill before finally discarding the sheet of kitchen paper into the black (mixed waste) bin.
A trait I have picked up from my father. An engineer, someone who survived the hardships of German occupation, the Warsaw Uprising and a prisoner-of-war camp - and then, having made it to a post-war London of austerity and rationing, he saved hard as a young married man for a deposit on a house, and was always careful with money and material things.
He'd make do and mend, repair and watch the pennies. As a youth growing up in the 1970s, I'd find this behaviour odd and different to my friends' fathers, most of whom had also gone through the privations of wartime. He maintained this approach his whole life, as though he realised that there was a greater reason for avoiding waste than just economics.
I'm going that way myself. Count me out of the consumerist race to own more and more material possessions. Focus on saving money rather than making money - for the good of one's soul - and for the good of our planet. Making money just to squander it is a tremendous waste of effort.
As I wiped the bottom of the pan, I wondered about the epigenetics of thrift. Had my father had a less materially challenging youth, would he have been so careful to avoid waste? I know many Poles, who, at the end of communism, threw themselves wholeheartedly into the consumerist lifestyle, as if to catch up with those decades of drabness. My daughter tells me of young people of her age, five or six years after graduating from university, who are earning 16,000 zł a month net, or who drive Porsche Cayennes. Their parents' generation didn't have the chance to wallow in materialism; they do.
So there doesn't seem to be a connection to be made here. Maybe it's not an epigenetic, but a spiritual thing.
Below: several days ago, I found a discarded pair of shoes beside the path from Jakubowizna to Machcin II. The shoes were worn right down, but the laces were still good - so I extracted them. Just what I needed - I had an old (1990s) pair of sneakers (below) which sat around unworn because the original rawhide laces had snapped, then snapped again; but now, with the found laces, the sneakers are back in service. Shame about the holes in the canvas. The sneakers may not represent Luxury, but they are Comfortable. Walking around in sneakers without laces, however, represents Discomfort - something to be avoided.
A propos of genetics, my brother had a DNA test done a few years ago, which showed that our father's Y-DNA haplogroup was I2a (subclade CTS10228). The I2a haplogroup is interesting, a very old European lineage - the phylogenetic tree goes right back the mesolithic period. Haplogroup I2a was the most frequent Y-DNA among western European mesolithic hunter-gatherers, found in 13,500 year-old remains in modern Switzerland. (About 15 years ago, I had a 'matching pair' of dreams of astounding clarity and emotional strength in which I was a cave-dweller living with a view of snow-capped mountains in late summer, the smell of the cave, burnt animal fat, dirty animal-skin bedding; very realistic, very atavistic.)
Connections across time, across space - we can be open to them if we cease worrying about material wants.
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