Doing is more important than having.
All too often, the most important part of prepping is ignored. The most important part of prepping is having the ability to do.
All too often preppers tend to concentrate on stuff, but having stuff makes no difference if you don’t know how to use what you have.
Doing not having: An example
Here’s an example. Right now, in the place where I live, it is deer hunting season.
Even though there’s a pandemic on its not the type of “Stuff Hits The Fan” (SHTF) emergency that will cause a lack of “Rule of Law” or a failure of the Rule of Law out here in the hinterlands.
The hunters who live locally go out and hunt their own land, and the people who rent land, come out to their deer camps, and hunt for their big bucks, just like a normal year.
I’m going to use this as an example to illustrate doing vs. having.
Let’s switch over to the having a side of the discussion from the doing side of the discussion. There are a lot of people who have big game rifles, there are a lot of people who have ammunition. And there are a lot of preppers who have purchased these devices so they can hunt deer.
Those rifles are quietly sitting in the gun cases in the gun safes, the ammunition is stocked away either in the gun safe or an ammo box. The owners are sitting around and watching Netflix or spending time on their phones, or tablets, or computers on prepping forums talking about how they are ready if the Stuff Hits The Fan.
One is doing, the other is having.
Hunting, shooting, butchering, and preserving a deer is not rocket science. People with no formal education whatsoever and affordable matter can do it. Having said that, it’s very much a learned skill. And if you have not learned how to do these processes before the SHTF, then your chances of success after the stuff hits the fan is something as basic and simple as deer hunting is a real problem.
As an aside, deer hunting after the quote unquote, “Stuff Hits The Fan” will not be what most people think it would be. Deer will be hunted to near extinction within a month of a SHTF situation. They’re just not that many deer compared to the number of human beings are who need to be fed.
Deer hunting will quickly turn into cattle poaching, and cattle poaching in a situation where the rule of law is gone or strained is an extremely bad idea as something likely to get the poacher hung.
Of course, I’m just using all of this as an example of the many, many things where we have supplies, but we don’t practice “do it”.
I’m as guilty as many on this.
There are many things that I’ve done in my lifetime that I should probably brush up on. I don’t normally deer hunt, but I have deer hunting.
I don’t really like to tend to camp. I don’t find it comfortable. But I have to camp a lot. In my younger days. I spent as much time in a tent and in the woods during my teenage years, as I did in my own room because I was active in the Boy Scouts. My troop camped every other weekend.
When we camped it was year round in the Midwest. We snow camped, we ice camped. We set up our tents in the 110 degree heat of summer, in the spring rains and in the fall dampness.
I’m sure that to some of you this may sound like the old “Yeah, well, when I was a kid we walked eight miles to school every day and it was uphill both ways. Kind of a story. It was just a different day. That’s what we did. People camped we get we rode our bicycles as a troop with our tents and supplies strapped to the the back of them.
We wrote 15 – 20 miles to the various camp site, parked the bikes, set up camp, cooked our food, told camp stories, the whole deal.
I don’t camp anymore, but I know how to do it. I should probably set up camp just to polish the skills.
I probably will one of these days there.
See what I said? Right there?
One of these days.
The phrase “one of these days” is the enemy of many activities. “One of these days” is the opposite of getting it done.
You probably say it, I definitely say it far too often. What we need all need to do, stating right here with good ole Salty, is to avoid the “one of these days” mentality. Again, I put myself at the top of this list.
Here’s my questions, (these are just rhetorical, something for you to consider).
- What preps do you have that you haven’t tested?
- What skills did you have in your youth (assuming you’re older that you haven’t used in years)?
- What brand spanking new prepping products do you have still in the shrink wrap stored away that you don’t know, actually work?
- What plans have you made recently that you’ve said one of these days about?
These are questions that I’m asking you, and these are questions that I’m frankly also asking myself, because I am not a super prepper ninja.
I’m not an expert on everything. I’m just a guy who’s made a lot of mistakes, and who’s tried to learn from them and share anything that I may have learned from my massive piles of screwing up.