Sometimes the Most Prepared Thing You Can Do Is Change the Plan

I’ve spent more than fifteen years telling people that preparedness means being willing to change your plans when circumstances change. “Nothing is engraved in stone,” I’ve written again and again. “Respond to what’s actually happening, not what you think should be happening.”

So…It turns out that following my own advice is a whole lot harder than giving it.

If you’re like me, you created plans years ago. You made them back when you were younger, fitter, and healthier. Maybe you were more active, spent more time outdoors, and did Ironman Triathlons on a whim. Perhaps you had better vision and hearing. It could be that you were more resilient in the face of stress. Maybe you didn’t have other folks depending on you then, and you do now. Maybe you had folks to depend on then, but you don’t now.

The very nature of life is that it changes. Our responsibility is to adapt when it does.

The plan you had then worked for who you were then. But maybe it doesn’t now. Maybe you need to take a good hard look at your situation and adapt accordingly.

Know when it’s time to change your survival plan.

You wouldn’t tell somebody to remain in a house that was becoming unsafe simply because they’d spent years stocking it to the rafters and turning it into the perfect survival retreat.

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Sometimes circumstances change. A location becomes unsuitable. Resources become scarce. Your physical abilities change. So many different things can happen to our well-laid plans. There’s an old Yiddish proverb that goes, “Der mentsh trakht un got lakht.”

The translation?

Man plans. God laughs.

Ain’t that the truth? Sometimes, the smartest preparedness decision might be to leave your carefully constructed Plan A behind.

This has been a recurring theme for me, and the music has only sped up over the past few years as my health went to heck in a handbasket.

I always thought I’d end up living in a place like Grace, in The Widow in the Woods. It would be up in the mountains, amidst the trees, with a bubbling mountain stream and wind chimes as a soundtrack. I would live in an adorable little home you could only find if you knew exactly where to look for it. I would be surrounded by books, animals, and gardens. There would be a delightful greenhouse apothecary where I concocted mysterious things. My pretty kitchen would have herbs drying in the windows and home-canned goods lining my pantry shelves.

But, here I am, not even 60 years old, and already pretty dadgum gimpy with serious health issues. This was not in my plan. In my plan I would still be rambling around Europe having adventures and seeing the world, only to retire to that home in another ten years or fifteen years or so.

Now, it’s quite unrealistic. Being that isolated would be dangerous to the point of being foolish. I spend a lot of time at doctor’s offices and hospitals. I have specialists that can only be found in urban areas. I need the support of loved ones from time to time to help with tasks I simply cannot do anymore.

I can still make little parts of the original dream come to life, but I had to completely adapt the way I prepare now. I had to completely change the way I live now.

Is it time for you to look at your own plans to see if they are still realistic? I hope they are. I know from painful experience how difficult it is to let go of who you thought you’d be.

You have to protect your most important resources.

What are your own most important resources? That question can be answered differently by nearly everyone.

And most often, we think in terms of external things. Our food. Our preps. Our home in its ideal location. The creek running out back. Or maybe it’s people – our loved ones, our friends, and possibly our neighbors. It might be spirituality or faith. Our most important resources aren’t always tangible.

Don’t get me wrong: those are all very important, vital even.

But the one thing I have discovered it’s very difficult to get by without has been my health. This decline has been shocking. It has often felt like the rest of my life has just been creeping and dragging past, but at other times, like it’s all going way too fast. It “should” have been a slower decline, in line with aging. Not just “poof, your life as you knew it is over.”

If something in your plan doesn’t support your health, I promise you, you need to adjust your plan.

Preserve what matters, but don’t confuse preservation with staying put.

Preparedness isn’t always about getting the outcome you wanted. Sometimes it’s about making the best possible choice among the options you have left.

My recovery from the most recent round of surgeries has been anything but linear. If anything, it has underlined the unpredictability of my health. A couple of weeks ago I wrote you a very optimistic note about feeling so much better. Last week I had a flare and was in bed for nearly the entire time. Not only did I feel awful, but I felt so horribly disappointed. I kept reminding myself I had surgery. Nobody had performed a magical cure that would last forever.

But after finally perking up and feeling some real energy for the first time in ages, it was incredibly frustrating to find myself back in bed again.

Don’t get me wrong – the surgical repairs have made a massive difference in my day-to-day quality of life. Before, I would’ve ended up in the hospital hooked up to IVs and watching repeats of NCIS twenty hours a day. This time, I needed regular naps, early bedtime, and easy activities while I rested my way through it. I needed to go back to easy-to-digest things like yogurt and cottage cheese for a few days while my digestive system had its hissy.

I also used the time to work on a change I had been considering for a long time. I began closing up a section of The OP that was the key to its early success: commentary and current events.

While it was definitely a major part of why my site was successful, it was also why my site stopped making money. It was why I was defunded, it was why the site was labeled a “disinformation” website, and it was why I had to let go of all the wonderful folks who have written here over the years. I had to spend a fortune each month on website security, advanced servers, and technical support.

And I just don’t have the money to protect all that anymore. But it isn’t only that.

I’m tired.

Writing about the outrages perpetrated by the mainstream media, the government, and the elites who seem to see the rest of us as lesser beings than them is exhausting. To write about these outrages, I had to be outraged by them. And I was. Some of the things I’ve covered are so insane that I wouldn’t believe me either if I didn’t realize how the world worked.

But, over the years, and particularly after my immune system gave me an epic smackdown, it had become a source of tremendous stress. Fighting every day not to be debanked, debunked, and deplatformed while still sharing my observations became incredibly stressful. For more than a dozen years, I handled it just fine. I was used to stress. I ate stress for breakfast and washed it down with a whole pot of extra-strong coffee. Adrenaline was my constant companion.

But finally, I realized I had to make a decision about this, too. It’s the most unhealthy part of my business and it has to go. I cannot let it continue to take a toll on my well-being. So I’ve been spending the past week or so removing commentary and controversial content from the website.

And you know what? I’m sad about it. Really sad. It has broken my heart to dismantle a big part of what was so much of my identity for all these years. But I know that it is the right thing to do.

I’ve preserved it in an archive. I compiled The Conspiracy Files, Volume 3: The Final Collection while removing content from publication. Today is your final opportunity to purchase it because once the sale ends, I’m removing it from the store. Doing so keeps my sites more secure, my costs down, and protects my merchant accounts. I gave the option of paying as little as $2 for you to download these documents. I really want you to be able to have them. You can keep them to look back on the details of things that happened while the MSM tries to memory-hole that stuff.

I made a decision to make controversy and conflict part of my past. It can no longer be part of my future. I have a gentler future planned now, one that doesn’t take such a toll on me.

The end of one era isn’t the end of the story, though.

There are still thousands of articles remaining on the website with preparedness and survival advice. (More than 4000! And I still have stories to tell – oh boy, do I have stories in the works!

While I’m sad to end something that was such an enormous part of my life, I’m also excited about the future. And this is the first time in a lot of years I’ve felt that way.

Change is hard, but it can also free up time and space for more positive things.

Self-reliance isn’t insisting you can keep doing everything the way you’ve always done it. Sometimes it’s having the courage to admit that things have changed and making a new plan while you still have the ability to choose.

Thank you so much for staying on this journey with me.

…

Remember, once this limited sale ends, the collections will no longer be available through my store, and the original articles will no longer be found on The Organic Prepper. 

I’ve also made the first two volumes available again for this final day, so you can complete the collection before they’re gone.

The Conspiracy Files: “Crazy” Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be True

The Conspiracy Files, Volume 2: More Events the Media Would Like You to Forget

The Conspiracy Files, Volume 3: The Final Collection