As I age I've (slowly) learned to not bite the hand that feeds, but more importantly to be even more cognisant of context.

Graduate school was good for taking my internal moral pendulum and tossing it from one extreme to another. Everything in writing is about context, and that lesson was not lost on me in deconstructing my own writing. In the few logic and literary criticism classes I took, however, the Western, phalo-centric methods of logic do not really allow for the introduction of context. When arguing a point you are expected to "stay-on-point," or to rebuff issues that can lead off on a tangent rather than take the focus off of the point of the argument.

As I've become more comfortable and confident with my own perspective on the world and how all of its puzzle pieces fit together I see how important context is. In this context, I was embarrassed to come home and drive my own car.

Driving around Ireland I was struck by the modest size of everything. Homes. Cars. Food portions. Everything is...well sized. There is still a sense of excess being, well, excessive.

Sodas do not come in 20 oz, and larger "single-serving" sizes. Many single serving sizes are as small as 8 US ounces. You will rarely find yourself finishing a meal in a restaurant and feeling so stuffed you must unbutton the top button of your pants. Now four hours later in the pub, after a moderate excess of Guiness, you may be unbuttoning your pants, but that's a different story.

So many of the local streets are still the same width they've been since they were horse cart paths. The cars are diminutive by American standards; this follows a certain European sensibilty of need, and cost. With gasoline costing the equivalent of $8 a US gallon, that is a distinctive factor in reducing the size of cars, and therefore ones consumption of gas.

And along with smaller cars, and amounts of food served, houses are smaller as well. The newer McMansions built in the last ten years since a political maneuver lead to the elimination of at least one housing tax, houses in Ireland are now being built much larger than ever before -- by Irish standards. A McMansion may run 4000 square feet or more. These extra-large new housing developments have homes around 2500 square feet. This is considered large.

Cattle is all raised in fields where they can roam and eat grass freely; this is all grass fed beef -- a luxury item in Whole Foods in the US. Neighbors stop two cars abreast on the small streets to converse with each other. Community is bound by church, and state, and history.

Of course we can never apply the lessons of such a geographically small, and relatively homogenous country to a nation-state like the US, but we certainly can reevaluate our consumption patterns, and ask ourselves why does something have to have the super-size option? What happened to our ability to say "I've had enough." What is the new norm of full really mean overflowing?

This is more that buying a hybrid car to reduce a carbon footprint; it's about reducing your overall consumption footprint, which benefits your waist band, and your waste band.