Tag: catalyst

I’m wearing the warmest boots I currently own, a pair of Thinsulate hunting boots I bought a few years ago at Academy Sports in Edmond, Oklahoma, in advance of a winter “Venture Scouts” camping trip I took with our oldest daughter. In this post I want to reflect a little on the severe blast of cold weather that is hitting the United States this week, and how this relates to the idea of being a “Communitarian Prepper.” For some reason, I also just want to reflect a little on these boots. So here we go…

I’m enroute to visit my parents in Manhattan, Kansas, today, for a short visit. My dad told that later this week the wind chill is going to get down to something crazy like minus 30 or minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. That is insane. I really don’t remember many times growing up in northeast Kansas, in the 1980s, when we had weather that cold. Checking out the forecast in the iOS Carrot weather app (my new fav, since “Dark Sky” is going offline in 2023) it looks like Thursday at 3 am the local temperature in Manhattan is supposed to be minus 13 degrees F. That’s WITHOUT wind chill, of course. During the day Thursday, it will warm up all the way to positive 4 degrees F. Yikes.

I love the fact that we live in Charlotte, North Carolina, now, where the weather is generally milder than what I’ve experienced most of my life in the midwest. Charlotte rarely receives snow, although they did last winter. Apparently it was the first time in 4 years they had snow. In Oklahoma, we experienced some pretty brutal ice storms over the years, living there 16 years, from 2006 to 2022.

The worst was in January 2007, when I flew to MacWorld with my cousin, Devin Henley. It was amazing, but Oklahoma City received over a foot of ice and the OKC airport shut down for several days. Devin and I got stuck flying back in Denver, but made the best of it by staying with a family friend, purchasing some ski gear at REI, and taking the “ski train” to spend a day skiing at Winter Park! Stuck at home without power and three young children, Shelly was not super-happy with me.

When severe weather strikes, wherever you happen to be, you need to be PREPARED NOW. In the craziness of moving from Oklahoma to North Carolina last summer, we left a LOT of stuff behind. Apparently, those abandoned items included my winter ski gloves, because they are not in the large trunk of “stuff” we have in our new garage, where I did pull these winter hunting boots out last night.

Incidentally, these boots are NOT the ideal footwear for passing through airport security checkpoints. At some point I’d like to pay and enroll in TSA Precheck, but at this point, I don’t have any special privileges when it comes to airport security.

I’m hoping to buy some new winter gloves at the Manhattan WalMart early in this visit. Literally the only gloves or mittens I have to use at this point are a pair of wool hiking socks, which I had to use for this purpose over Thanksgiving break when our Charlotte temperatures fell below freezing.

Happy first day of Thanksgiving break! It’s a cool, crisp morning for a walk with our dogs.

Unfortunately, I have no idea where my gloves are in our remaining boxes from our Oklahoma move, so I had to use some wool socks as mittens this morning. But they work! #goldenretriever pic.twitter.com/7JvJ9B4SxZ

— Wesley Fryer, Ph.D. 🌎🎙🚀 he/him (@wfryer) November 21, 2022

My level of winter preparedness, living now as a new resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, may be at an all-time lifetime low. I did find my thermal underwear to bring, and a fleece hat, but to not have any winter gloves to use? This is a sad level of preparedness indeed.

So this brings me back to thinking about emergency preparedness, and living into this idea of being a “communitarian prepper.” We all need CATALYSTS which encourage (or in some cases, FORCE) us to change our thinking and behavior. Most people will not simply wake up one day, sans-catalyst, and decide to change their own mindset and ways.

Sometimes our CATALYST which pushes us to change our ways is traumatic. In the past six months, I’ve had opportunities to interact with different adults taking some self-defense / self-protection classes, and the stories some of them have told about “Why I’m here” have been heart wrenching. It’s always better to “find your why” to “change your ways” in a non-traumatic, more intellectual activity (like reading a blog post, for instance) rather than a life-threatening, “fight or flight” moment of true struggle and survival.

I’m not sure what the word for this is, but maybe I can suggest a few creative possibilities and others will chime in with other suggestions. Sometimes we change our ways because of:

1. Externally imposed, traumatic life events (the death of a relative or a friend, becoming permanently disabled in an accident)
2. An authority figure in our lives who demand changes (could be a parent or a spouse)
3. New circumstances which require us to live differently (moving to the northern tier, for instance, which has harsher and more brutal winter weather requiring a different wardrobe and different routines through the winter months)

Maybe we can call those, “externally imposed life change catalysts.” These kinds of changes are unavoidable, given the facts of a new context. To survive, to live, or even to THRIVE (and isn’t that a lovely goal) we have to make important changes.

The other kind of thinking and behavior change catalysts are CHOICE CATALYSTS. These are events, ideas, conversations, or observations we experience which we CHOOSE to MAKE into catalysts. Examples could include:

1. We don’t have to go on a diet and lose weight, but we notice undesirable changes in our weight, so we decide to make some dietary, lifestyle, exercise and/or routine changes.
2. We recognize how our thinking and our interactions with others are affected by our use of mobile technologies, so we decide to make some screentime changes to address those unwanted dynamics.
3. We have to get out all our cold winter clothing for an upcoming trip to the midwest, and realize we are not only poorly prepared for cold-weather activities, we’re also still pretty poorly prepared for a variety of potential emergencies or crises.

This, then, can be a defining characteristic of a “communitarian prepper,” as well as just an individual who wants to be better prepared for the potental (and often unforeseen) challenges of life: Seeking CHOICE CATALYSTS in life and then making an individual ACTION PLAN so those catalytic events / ideas / experiences propel us forward into our better prepared, aspirational future.

Today, I choose to make the four days this week when I’ll be wearing my Thinsulate hunting boots into a CHOICE CATALYSTS event as a “communitarian prepper,” I’ve got some brainstorming to do!

To be continued…