Saturday, December 3, 2011

“Being Prepared”

I have literally written down my thoughts and then clicked and not saved it several times now on the subject of “Being Prepared” and the reasons why this is so important.

I’m honestly not sure why I have chosen in the past not to save what I wrote. It is not because I did not think it was well written or that enough thought had not gone into what I was trying to say.

No, the reason was I felt uncomfortable because the subject itself for me seems stress filled and full of hypothetical situations where if you are honest with yourself they are no perfect answers.

Being prepared itself is not the problem but trying to determine what you are preparing for and to what extent is a critical issue!

If you spend anytime at all on the internet and go the route of looking on various survival sites you quickly can become overwhelmed by the degree of doom and gloom that is presented. Let’s see, some of the topics are: total economic collapse, no food, no water and protecting yourself from the ever present band of lawless thugs rioting and looting every house on your street. Oh, yea and solar flares, and I guess it is worth mentioning the 2012 end of the world according to the Mayan Calendar.

So with all this said it is no wonder why the vast majority of people have the tendency to throw their hands in the air and shrug their shoulders and give up before even starting.

Do I worry about not having power or water or sewer services? No I do not. Any disruption in services typically happens after a natural disaster and is short lived in nature. When this happens can you be uncomfortable, but it is not unbearable. Obviously the longer the duration the more frustrating it becomes but again it is not something that causes the fabric of society to come apart at the seams! I realize some may point to what happened in New Orleans and beg to differ with me. To that I would say that I agree; chaos can occur anywhere and anytime but after the dust settles society as a whole finds what is normal fairly quickly.

In the US we have had economic disasters with the stock market crashing and people losing lots of their wealth. People, however, did not go out and try to overthrow the government and somehow the population survived to the next generation and the next.

Are the threats we face real today? You beat yah! Will we likely see a huge amount of change within the next few years? We always have because that is the natural progression of things. Change is constant.

The most important part of all this hearing a line from Rudyard Kipling which reminded us: “Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.”

Take heart in knowing that change is inevitable. Also note that how you react to change is entirely within your control!