Sunday, March 24, 2013

Semper Paratus

Being interested in the history of my genealogy from a young age meant that I knew the motto of my family name, McCready, was Semper Paratus. It is also used by the Scout movement and the US Coast Guard service. However having it as your family motto and being aware of it meant for me that it did have a full on  influence on my life. I have felt the need to diversify the focus of my blog for a while as tracking is such a specialised skill set that it also dictates a narrow viewership; I am therefore going to look at what it means to be always prepared.

I have been a part of the tracking and survival scene for the last 12 years of my life having initially trained in Northern Ireland and then spending most of the last decade with Shadowhawk Tracking school. As a civilian I have been able to make many more opportunities for myself within this scene than I did within my unimpressive service with the regular army in the  REME or the territorial army with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.

I would say the best part of my time with Shadowhawk was mixing with the varied backgrounds of the other instructors as well as the clients; there was constant learning going on. Learning and education and personal development was definitely part of the group ethos. If I had to describe the predominant of the varied mindsets, I would use the words Tactical Thinking. I enjoyed this part of the tracking so much that I completed the Tactical Tracking course twice and will probably do it again in the future.

It is with a tactical thinking mindset that I approach any sort of praxis or philosophy of the concept of prepping. For me that means thinking things through and planning, having standard operating procedures not only thought out but practiced.

There are plenty of people out there blogging about what to prepare, youtube videos on what kit to get and such things. I am going to apply my thinking as a tracker to prepping so that my blog has its own niche within the growing plethora of other media that is already out there on this topic.

So for the newbie to this concept,  I will give a brief explanation from a standard point of view to the question of:

What is prepping?

Prepping is short for the word prepared on preparing. It is an international term now, well at least in the western world between the USA and the UK. It is about being prepared for misfortune, a common cliche statement is to prepare for the worst rather than hoping for the best. So I guess it helps in being a prepper if you are a pessimist or a pessimist who believes that he/she is a realist. To be honest, people prep all the time, when you get contents or car insurance you are prepping. When you carry a first aid kit in your car you are prepping, when you stock up on a few buy one get one free sales you are prepping. The question is to what shade are you prepping. My next post should be called 50 shades of prepping. Number 1 would be buying some of those buy one get one free snacks for a weekend binge and number 50 would be building an underground bunker complex and having genetic screening in place for re population after Armageddon.