The Importance of Skills

August 1, 2006 at 9:03 pm (Skills, The Crash, The World Post-Collapse)

Gather around one and all, for I wish to speak with you about something very important. Practical Skills. Known by some as primitive skills, I choose to view them as something practical rather than something primitive.

These are skills such as the ability to go into the woods and come out with food, the ability to make fire without a match or a starter log, the ability to make a shelter capable of keeping you warm even during the chilliest of nights, the ability to make weaponry for a variety of uses, the ability to find and purify water, and so much more than all of these. They are not skills to take lightly. They are skills you must know if you hope to survive. You may survive without a few of them for a while, but your odds of surviving throughout the first winter without civilized comforts and without these skills would most certainly not be in your favor.

Learn these things now. They are not things to look at and think that since you know how to do them, though not know how to do them expertly, that you will survive. Learn them and then do them everyday as practice until you have to do them everyday because of necessity. Do not fall into the belief that since you know something you can move onto things that are nice to know, though not essential for survival, such as the making of shampoo. Yes, the making of shampoo would certainly be nice to know and certainly learn those non-essential things if you have the chance to, but never abandon the essentials. Do them until your muscle memory could do them without you even having to think about them.

Time is short. It would not do to carry a book in your hand listing edibles in the middle of the woods after civilization as a “cheat.” Learn them, recognize them, remember them. Rely on your memory. Do not rely on something you may or may not have with you. You may not become an expert on any of these things, but if you wish to survive in the long run, you’d better get as close as you possibly can to that mark.

– Miranda Vivian