Growing Along the Way

It's below freezing outside, and many of us are missing our furnaces. It's not unbearably cold, but it really sucks. Like camping ALL THE TIME.

Moving on...

While on my now daily jog, I stopped by the main gate and helped a repair team there fix a broken bolt. Not a big deal, we have plenty of extras, but it made me think about some of the positive things the zombie plague has done.

I'm not saying I am glad it happened. The fall of society (which I often refer to in the appropriate caps "The Fall") was obviously the single most devastating event in the history of mankind. The greater majority of all people on Earth are dead, as far as anyone can tell. Families and communities have been sundered, and after enough time it's a real possibility that there will be too few of us left to continue on as a species.

But hear me out.

What is left of humankind are some of the most intelligent, versatile and resourceful people I have seen. As much as it galls me to do so, I have to say the same of many of the marauders that seem to crop up in groups across the country. I hate them, but they have managed to stay alive and thrive when most others didn't.

Mostly, though, it's the people I see around me on a daily basis. All of us have had to learn to do things that we had never considered before. People who had spent their lives as pencil pushers worrying about the cost of groceries are now farming their own land. All of us have skills and knowledge about that now, since so much of our land within the compound is used to grow food.

We've all learned some carpentry and building, weapons and hand to hand combat, how to fire a gun and hit what you aim for. A huge variety of skills and knowledge none of us had before. That's not even including the things we're learning from the books and copied web pages at our disposal. Many people are learning things that may never be useful, but have always wanted to know about. Groups of people are learning many useful things as well, from those of us in Evans' medical classes to the guys and gals trying to teach themselves electrical engineering in advance of trying to make our power stations work.

It's like we became a community full of my wife. If you've read this blog for a long time, you know that Jess has always had this weird but useful form of OCD where she gets obsessed with something and then does nothing else until she masters it. She did it with assembling computers, making chain mail, growing vegetables, sewing...the list goes on and on. She's sort of the template for us as a group.

I can't help but wonder at the changes in all of us over the last eight months. I know many of us have had to do very bad things, but for today, I like to think about the positives we've also managed from this tragic set of circumstances.