The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [132]
My advice here is crisp and clear: Find the smallest and easiest thing you can do, and then do it. It doesn’t matter what that first step is. If that thing for you is buying an extra jar of pimentos because you can’t imagine life without them, then buy an extra jar next time you’re out shopping and put them in the pantry. I’m only halfway joking. I call this “Step Zero” to symbolize something minor that might precede step one. The point is that small steps lead to bigger steps. If you’ve not yet taken Step One toward personal preparation and resilience, I invite you to consider taking Step Zero first.
Other Step Zero examples might be taking out a small bit of extra cash to store outside of the bank in case of a banking disruption, buying a bit more food each week to slowly deepen your pantry, or going online to learn something more about ways you can increase your resilience around water, food, energy, or anything else you deem important to your future. It doesn’t much matter what it is, as long as you take an action that has meaning to you.
The goal of Step Zero is to break the ice now and get things rolling. My motto is, I’d rather be a year early than a day late.
The fifth concept of preparation is to start with small steps.
The Importance of Community
Of all the steps that I’ve taken, building my community has developed the most important element of my resilience. Whatever the future holds, I’d rather face it surrounded by the people I respect, admire, and love in my local community, people whom I trust and know I can count on. That’s my measure of true wealth.
In my case, I joined up with a number of other individuals who were interested in actively preparing for the future. Over the course of a year, we met as a group and went through each and every component of a self-assessment that we designed, covering nine basic areas of our lives. (You can find a free version of this self-assessment on my web site at www.ChrisMartenson.com/self-assessment.) We took a good, hard look at our then-current situations, made plans for preparation and change, and held each other accountable for following through with our plans. The support we shared was, and still is, invaluable.
The rest of my family has become deeply hooked into a wider community of people who are actively engaged in nature awareness, permaculture, native skills, fruit collection, and other pastimes that feel recreational but also offer deeper and more resilient connections to people and nature.
I would recommend working with people you trust or with whom you already share basic values. The closer they live to you geographically, the better. I have no interest in living in fear, and my plan is to live through whatever comes next with a positive attitude and with as much satisfaction and fun as I can possibly muster. So it has always been important to me to be in community with others who share this outlook.
I now count this group as one of the most important elements in my life. I know the people I can talk to about next steps, I know people whom I can count on in an emergency, and I know who will look after my family if I happen to be out of town when something big goes awry. And now that I have experienced the pleasures (and joys and frustrations) of working in a group setting on matters of preparation, I would immediately join or start another group if I happened to move to a different area.
It’s incredibly helpful to find people to join forces with as you step through the basics of self-preparation. I encourage you to consider seeking like-minded locals with whom to form such a group, if you haven’t already done so, and to encourage