For a long time, the tagline at the end of my blog posts or newsletters has been,

“Remember, knowledge isn’t knowing something, it’s living it.”

That tagline communicates part of what I’m about here. It’s easy to sit here and to “Monday morning quarterback” preparedness.  I enjoy reading and learning interesting tidbits of information.  I don’t know about you, but sometimes, I also like to watch Netflix – probably a little too much.  It’s much easier for me to delegate preparedness tasks to my kids instead of taking any given task on myself and learning it REALLY WELL before delegating it

That tagline though, “Remember knowledge isn’t knowing something, it’s living it,” is like a  winter coat in Illinois at the beginning of October.  It’s bulky.  At the same time, it’s like a using a small umbrella when you’re out walking the dog.  It doesn’t cover enough.  So I did some brainstorming.  We’re going to have a new tagline here at A Year Without the Grocery Store.

Love, Learn, Practice, Overcome

This is exactly what I’m about.  It’s dressed in an appropriate lightweight jacket, and like a golf umbrella, it covers everything I want to cover.  But I want to take a little time today and unpack this for you.

Love

Everything we do in preparedness should start from a heart of love.  I LOVE my family.  Because I love them I want to be prepared.  I love my family, so if we get hit with a winter storm, I want to make sure that I have enough wood to use the wood stove for a good long time! Because I love my family so very much, I want to make sure I learn how to garden (even if it’s a container garden on a balcony of an apartment) so that I can help provide food for them if something happens to a job.

I also love those around me.  When we lost water for a few hours one evening, I walked around the neighborhood to make sure that some of our older neighbors had enough water in their homes or find out if they needed some, since we keep a few gallons jugs of water on hand for giving out in such emergencies.

I love those that visit my blog or get to know me in person and want to teach the lessons I learned from my struggles.  Sometimes it’s hard putting yourself out there.  I’ve experienced a real anxiety over whether or not people will resonate with what I write or whether or not people will even READ what I write!  It would be quite a buzz kill to put yourself out there for MONTHS to have one or two people read what you share.  But loving other people really is at the heart of what I do.

Love not Fear  

As preppers, sometimes, it’s easy to be motivated, not by love, but by fear.  I’m afraid of what will happen if the economy collapses!  I’m afraid of what will happen if I lose my job.  What will happen if we get hit by Hurricane Michael; I’m afraid.  Fear is NEVER a good motivator because once the thing that you’re afraid of is passed or it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, or you decide you’ll just throw in the towel if that event really ever does happen, you’ll stop doing what you need to do to protect your family, your neighbors, or those who God puts in your path.

I want all of us to learn to do what we do because we love those around us and because we want to bless those around us because we realize that our good is inextricably intertwined with the good of those around us.  As I often tell my kids, we rise as a family, we fall as a family.  If one of us does something really stupid, we ALL pay the consequences.  Think about it.  If my husband walked into work and starting shooting his mouth off at his boss (which would NEVER happen) and he got fired for doing that stupid thing, is it just him that suffers for that?  No!  We all suffer.  There is no money coming in.  We have no way to feed our family.  We don’t know if we can keep our house.

It’s the same way with those around you.  If you can bring your family along, if you can help them learn skills by going camping or by gardening together, you all benefit.  The same goes for your neighbors.  If you can challenge your neighbors to grow a garden, they benefit, those around them benefit, and everyone is stronger together.

This is what I want to communicate with this blog.  We need to LOVE.

Learn

Learning takes so many forms!  Right now, I’m learning in so many areas.  I’m learning about blogging and helping people by taking an online class.  I’m also learning how to garden.  While I read up on what I want to plant online, it’s still a growing effort, a ‘trial and error’ effort.  I’m also learning how to be a better parent.  I’m learning to pause and listen to what my children mean by what they say and do.

Read a book and learn something.  Learn other things by doing them.  Somethings we learn because we fell flat on our faces before we even realized we needed to learn them.

I want this blog to be a place of learning.  My desire is that some of the things I share really resonate with you and you have an “Aha!” moment from time to time.  I also want to learn from you.  Some of you know so much more than I do on certain topics.  I’m learning gardening as I go.  Each year a learn a little more.  I finally got over my fear of my pressure canner and canned something.  Some of you may have been pressure canning for YEARS.  I’d love to learn from you!

Never stop learning!

Practice

This is the only concept, of the four that I want to characterize this blog, that my last tagline really caught.  This is really the most important part of preparedness.  You can read about gardening until you are blue in the face.  You can even think that because you’ve read 10 gardening books that you are an expert.  Um……..no.  You have to get out there and actually GARDEN.  You need to practice what you read.

When it comes to food storage, have you ever cooked food from scratch?  If you had to bake a loaf of bread, could you do it?  Have you actually successfully accomplished it in the past?  More than twice?  Are you confident that you could replicate it again?

Do you own a firearm?  Has someone taken you out shooting so you can get the feel for it?  Do you know how to clean your firearm?

What about composting?  You’ve read about it?  Have you started a compost bin or a compost pile?

Have you ever baked over an open fire using the dutch oven that has sat in your basement for years?  How did it go?  What would you do if it’s raining?

I think you get the idea.  It’s not just about sitting here and reading the wealth of information that the net has to offer, it’s about getting out there and attempting all those things that you’ve been reading.

Overcome

Uhuh………ya know all those things that we talked about practicing?  Guess what.  Some of them are going to flop.  I don’t mean just a small jump into a shallow puddle kind of flop.  I’m talking about a belly-smacker from the high dive kinda flop.  A flop so bad it was PAINFUL and you never want to try it again kinda flop!  I know it hurt!  It may even have been embarrassing, but you CAN’T let it get the best of you!  You have to get out there and try it again!

There are parts of preparedness that you are going to breeze through on the first try and there are parts of preparedness at which you are going to fail over and over and over.  Sometimes, you need to learn more.  Other times you need an expert friend to walk you through it.  And, well sometimes, you just need to keep at it and it will improve over time.

So here’s a little story.  When I was really young, I learned how to crochet, and I took to it like a fish to water.  I was crocheting scarves, mittens, blankets, and more.  When I was in my early 20’s, I thought it would be fun to learn how to knit.  I mean, I could crochet circles around most people, so knitting should be easy, right?  Oh, belly laugh with me for a moment!  Can I just tell you that I couldn’t knit to save my life!  My scarves would get skinnier and skinnier the farther up the scarf I knitted.  I couldn’t hold the yarn right for knitting because you hold it totally different when you crochet.

I set knitting aside for a couple of years, then I tried it again.  It was a little better than my first really bad belly-laugh flop from the high-dive.  I dropped fewer stitches – I even learned what a drop stitch is and how to get it back on my knitting needle!  What do you do if your knitting needle doesn’t grab the entire strand of yarn?  Even with learning that, I still struggled.  It was hard, and honestly, time #2, I gave it up again.

About five years after that, my mother learned a different way of knitting that was much more like crocheting.  Suddenly, I was holding the yarn like I did when I was crocheting.  It felt right.  All of a sudden the whole thing just clicked.  Today, I can knit so much better than I can crochet.  I have knit socks, scarves, blankets, mittens, hats, dishcloths, pot holders and so much more!

Overcoming isn’t about never setting something aside to give your brain and your fingers time to figure out what was going wrong.  Overcoming is about determining to try again after you’ve failed.  You may give yourself a week, a month, six months, or a year, but you determine that you’re not going to let it get the best of you.  You determine that you will overcome!

So that is what this blog is all about!  That is my desire for both you and me as we interact on this blog.

I want us all to Love, Learn, Practice, and Overcome!