When I was younger, my sister and I each had a snow globe.
We loved shaking them and watching the snow swirl before settling neatly back into place. There was something deeply satisfying about it. The snow always fell where it should. Everything stayed contained. Everything felt, for a moment, perfect.
One afternoon, we discovered that if we clicked the snow globes together firmly enough, they made a satisfying sound. Unfortunately, as a result, they also shattered.
I remember staring at the water spreading across the floor and thinking those perfect little worlds were far more fragile than they appeared.
Years later, I contemplate that globe whenever I think about sustainability.
The snow is the part that stays with me the most. Not the globe itself, not the scene inside it, but the snow. The way it falls without thinking. Quietly, instinctively, the same way every time. That is what genuine sustainable habits feel like to me: walking instead of driving, donating clothes, reducing unnecessary consumption, and choosing second-hand. Actions so practiced they stop feeling like choices. They simply become the way you move through the world.
But this year, I will fly thousands of miles to attend Seoul National University in South Korea.
That is the shattering.
I will not pretend otherwise. The most environmentally costly thing I will do this year is also one of the most formative. Sustainability, I have come to understand, is not about a perfect unbroken globe. It is about honesty. About acknowledging the contradictions rather than hiding them and returning to your practice anyway.
I will travel and I will travel carefully. I will use Seoul’s public transport, support local businesses, pack lightly, and reduce food waste. These are not grand gestures. They are the same snow, falling again. And that consistency is precisely the point, because these everyday choices are what SDGs 11, 12 and 13 ask of all of us: responsible consumption, sustainable communities, and honest climate action, built not from perfection but from practice.
Sometimes I still shake a snow globe, expecting something new. Something more spectacular. But it is always the same snow falling.
I have stopped being disappointed by that.
In Seoul, I will let my habits guide me. The metro instead of a taxi. The local market instead of the chain restaurant. The second-hand jacket instead of the new one. Small, instinctive choices in an unfamiliar city, the same snow falling in a different city.
So where does the snow land? I have come to understand that even when the globe shatters, the snow still lands. It does not disappear. It does not stop mattering. The container breaks, but the snow falls in the same way. The habits remain. The choices still exist. The effort still settles somewhere, quietly, the same way it always has.
The globe was never the point. The snow was always the point.
And the snow always lands.
