The Turning Feral Journal - Day 4
Responsibility
Day 4: Responsibility. Responsibility is a major motivating factor to force the learning of self-sustainability. For me, when I moved to the woods I had only myself to care for. I had responsibility to provide the basic necessities like warmth, food, and shelter, but the degree to which I had to provide those things was flexible because I wasn’t looking for creature comforts. In fact, I was often intentionally seeking out discomfort.
However, once I met my wife and quickly started having kids and forming a little off-grid family, the weight of true responsibility set in. Now I wasn’t just responsible for myself in a remote and oft-dangerous environment, but I had a (very capable) wife, a small infant, and another on the way.
That introduction of needing to care for so many people in an environment that I was still learning to operate in was terrifying. Now my hunts weren’t just for fun… they were to provide food. Cutting trees for firewood wasn’t a vanity muscle exercise anymore, but a way to ensure my daughter would stay warm when it was -14*F and snowing. Maintaining the snowmobiles wasn’t about retaining their value as much as it was about keeping them running in case of a winter-time emergency. The list goes on and on and on… but, you get it.
This need to provide and bring stability to those closest to us is an amazing well that we can all tap into, and is one of the things I chatted about with my buddy Kyle Kingsbury on his podcast recently (clip from the episode below).
Daily Prompt: What sense of responsibility do you have in your life? What would happen to those you are responsible for if the things you depend on for food, shelter, and community were no longer available? Are there things you could be doing today that could help you ease that burden?:
Motivational Passage:
An overseer, then, must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money. He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity.
1 Timothy 3:2-5
Rewilding Action: Take time to list out all of the areas of your life that rely on things outside of your control. Where does your electricity come from? Where does the majority of your food supply originate? When you turn your faucet on in the kitchen, where does that water come from? As your list grows, you can start to think about how you may mitigate the impact to those you are responsible for and a gold star to those who already have some plans in place!