It is not determination that moves me. It is not willpower or anything that I have achieved. As a matter of speaking, my achievements have largely stood rather to hinder my ability to carry out these tasks, or my body upon successful completion. Dean's list sounds like 25 to 30 hours a week. Responsible firefighter is the same as 72 to 80 hours per week. Do you see how this gets in the way of playing out in the dirt?
And I say this like it’s all silly because if I looked at it for the way that my logical brain ties things together, it would be pretty depressing. I mean, watch two or three episodes of those bug-out guys. Watch a Bushcrafting video sometime. It’s a guy usually. Sometimes a woman; either way they are usually alone and they are usually anxious about what’s happening where everyone else is at. The “outside” world. (So why is this survival training again?)
And what about the bug-out guys? Well, they’ve got their whole family terrified the world is about to end. I know how I get when I talk about the Russians. Oh, am I driven? Yes. We are all driven. Sometimes. Driven to something. And often compulsively/impulsively. And I can be no different in that way.
What is the distinction then if there is any? It is not the same thing that stands tall or is measured in the accumulation of its merits. That is other people’s perception through the looking glass. One perspective of many. Gravity. Gravitas. Scale. Contrast. These are also perspectives. Rather, these are all re-orientations. So if we are all driven, what is the reorientation, the mechanism that moves a person? The one which binds all of us, baby. We’re all gonna die. The logos.
And that same supposition is what I believe drives so many of us to compulsively sit on the phone in our wallows because we’re sitting in gripping anxiety that we’re all gonna die.
Or that “I” am gonna die. The ego. The little-big me. And because some of us can’t handle the reality that people die and that that it is supposed to go that way, that it is not obliged to be a bad-news story, we can so quickly become fixated around the litany of possible things that could kill you today.
And for those of us who don’t really want all that bad stuff to happen in order to live off grid, we procrastinate.
What is happening around us? And make no mistake my friends… these things are occurring. And taken to scale, do these things that are occurring - such as corruption and poverty and wealth gaps - do these things cause existential rot in your day-to-day activities, the ones that you would be doing in some way, some form, wherever you happen to be born in the world and probably whatever time?
So then what is left then is the gravity of the situation. The population of Americans taken with the population of other western countries who at their core believe it is our right to suck from the teet of mother earth until we have been satiated. It never comes. Only the reorientation. My friend Arthur Haines says that all paths lead to rewilding. And in that way there is a path for everyone.
This procrastination, this negligent belief that it’ll only happen to someone else, and only happen here in the future allows us to be boiled like a frog in water, 1 degree at a time. My grandmother used to say that the United States would be taken over by the Soviets without a shot being fired; and back then the Soviets were good scapegoats -the evil empire, doing all this crazy stuff all over Russia and the USSR satellite states across the Baltic.
But then the Soviet Union, well it collapsed. And through the 1970s on corporations and government had already been doing the hard work of dismantling unions, negotiating trade deals with saxaphone-playing politicians, stripping away at the middle class (and still keeping minorities largely out). And then the Soviets fell and the American government and its allies turned those tactics inward to the mainland. Turtle Island. That system of scare tactics and competition on its own people, For *Mother Russia* The Economy! Too Big to Fail! How about this? For the pocketbooks. Just not ours. Carlin had it right. It’s a big club. And you ain’t in it.