Zachary Craig Hanson's Blog, page 9

Hoisting the Jolly Roger

Day 18: Knowing when to fight for something is a skill. One that has taken me nearly four decades to figure out. For most of my life I oscillated between being a perpetually scared individual who would cower to any presence of authority or physical prowess, and a young man who would pick a fight at the drop of a hat or go to bat for individuals who I felt needed “protecting.” Both of which always led to bad outcomes.

As Kenny Rogers said, “Know when to hold'em’, know when to fold' em, and know when to walk away,” and few truer words have ever been spoken. For me, this evolution has come around to understanding that I need to have the capacity to fight (physically and mentally), to hoist the jolly roger whenever I need, but to do so strategically – and only for pursuits that deserve the time, effort, sacrifice, and potential repercussions. 

But, how does one figure out what’s worth fighting for and what is just the ego prodding you into conflict? For me, pursuing stoic philosophy was the solution. The hyper-condensed TL;DR is don’t be so attached to something that you are forced into fighting a zero-sum game, but if you are forced into fighting… be ready for it. 

Choosing to fight up the mountain and having the capacity to do it.

Daily Prompt: Are you ready for a fight? If not, where do you need to develop fighting skills? Do you lack physical capability and need to hit the gym or learn a martial art? Do you lack mental discipline and need to destroy your own ego? Write down what you will do to close those gaps over the next year here:

Motivational Passage:
“Ego is the enemy- giving us wicked feedback, disconnected from reality. It’s defensive, precisely when we cannot afford to be defensive. It blocks us from improving by telling us that we don’t need to improve. Then we wonder why we don’t get the results we want, why others are better and why their success is more lasting.”

Ryan Holiday, “Ego Is The Enemy”

Rewidling Action: There are so many great resources on stoicism that you can peruse online. One of the staples in the space is Ryan Holiday and any one of his books is a great place to start.

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Fear as an Antidote

Day 17: Fear is an emotion that we all have an intimate relationship with. From early childhood, we conjure up things in our mind about what lurks just beyond what we can see. We wonder what’s hiding in the closet and concoct mental images of baba yaga or the boogeyman. But as we grow and learn, we realize that those childhood fears aren’t grounded in reality and there never was something to be afraid of. Sadly, though, we rarely grow out of that fear creation mindset.

As adults, we conjure our own boogeyman when we sit up thinking late at night about bills, jobs, addictions, partners, and achieving success. We create hurdles for ourselves and introduce anxieties for things that don’t even exist. 

The only way to prevent this is to embrace fear as the antidote to your boogeymen. When you feel yourself slipping into a fear mindset, you need to recognize what’s happening and filter out the rational vs. irrational thoughts. This ability only comes through repetition and putting yourself into controlled fear situations. This could be through sporting events (jiu jitsu competitions or marathons), public speaking, publishing your writing, backcountry camping, or anything that makes you feel scared.

Put yourself out there, feel scared, conquer it, and repeat. The more you do this, the easier it will be to control the fear emotion that cripples so many and parse out reality vs. the boogeyman.

Defeat your Baba Yaga

Turning Feral on Amazon

Daily Prompt: What is your biggest fear? How can you build resilience in small fears to help tackle your biggest? Write a few of those down here:

Motivational Passage:

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

Psalm 23:4

Rewilding Action: Have you ever butchered your own animal for meat? If you were like me 6 years ago, the answer would be a resounding “NO!” … and that’s OK. The good news is, these days you don’t have to learn to hunt to start gaining this skill. Many local farms offer reasonable packages where you can purchase all or part of an animal, they will humanely dispatch it, and then invite you to be a part of the butchering process. They show you the cuts of meat, how to remove them, and how to package them. Just google butchering classes in your area and you will likely find options closer to you than you think!

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Embrace Discomfort & Find Freedom

Day 16: Discomfort is something that our society actively avoids. We spend much of our lives building out processes and lifestyles that make things “easy.” While not wholly a terrible thing when avoiding certain types of discomfort (think injuries or sickness), when looked at in aggregate it is clear we are becoming a much softer society. People are afraid to be a little hungry, a little cold, and to be physically sore.

This has led us down a path of seeing huge increases in obesity amongst adults and children, avoidance of outdoor activities, and physical fitness levels at an all time low. We have prescribed drugs for every minor ailment and fought to ensure that you don’t have to face your problems head on if you don’t want to. We have pushed people away from embracing grit and pulled back from teaching that all great things come on the other side of discomfort.

Just spent 4 days camping out in the Sawtooth Wilderness in single digit temps… Very uncomfortable.

Daily Prompt: What areas of your life have you embraced a little too much comfort? What can you do today to avoid some of the normal comforts that are afforded to our society? Ex: Can you walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator or escalator?:

Motivational Passage: 

“This creep phenomenon applies directly to how we now relate to comfort, said Levari. Call it comfort creep. When a new comfort is introduced, we adapt to it and our old comforts become unacceptable. Today’s comfort is tomorrow’s discomfort. This leads to a new level of what’s considered comfortable.

Michael Easter - “The Comfort Crisis”

Rewilding Action: Go camping! There is nothing better to help break from your normal comforts than finding a spot to sleep and eat outside. This could be with a nice trailer, a tent, or anything in between, but find time to remove yourself from your normal creature comforts for at least a night this month.

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Struggle Well

Day 15: Things that you envision and day dream about rarely come to fruition exactly as you imagined. In fact, more times than not what you dream about is always “the best case scenario.” Take for instance my scholastic wrestling career. I would dream about getting my hand raised at the end of every match, but the reality was that I would sometimes find myself staring up at the gym lights as a better prepared opponent pinned my shoulders to the mat. Rough.

The same goes for my transition out West. As I drove out, I dreamt of tilling my own land, holding the horns of my first elk, and living like Grizzly Adams… And, some of it came true, but not of it came about in the way I dreamed it would. You see, what most of my daydreams left out was the struggling and the many instances of “getting pinned” by the reality of this lifestyle. But, what I did have were the callouses built up over a lifetime of learning to “struggle well.”

This is a saying that I have heard in a few different iterations over my life, but most recently by the owner of Sorinex, Bert Sorin. He articulated the concept so well at an event I attended (appropriately coined “tough fest”) by coaching folks that things never go as you expect it to, and that, in essence, struggling well is our main job in life as humans. Struggle will come, things won’t be as you want, and how you grow as a person will be defined in those moments so you need to build a tolerance to suffering and learn to “struggle well.”

Check out the clip below to hear Bert’s quote on this at 1:01:

Daily Prompt: What areas of your life aren’t going as you planned? Are you handling them gracefully? If not, how can you begin to “struggle well?”:

Motivational Passage:

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

-Dale Carnegie

Rewilding Action: Pick an action that you have been avoiding to undertake and do it. Embrace the struggle that will come with it and overcome it. This could be joining a fitness routine, starting a new diet, cold emailing someone about that job — it doesn’t matter. Pick something, execute, and struggle well no matter the outcome.

***PSA***

I will be out for the next several days for the end of rifle elk season and the beginning of beaver/otter/marten trapping. I will pick up the daily journals once I am back.

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Only Dead Fish Go With The Flow

Day 14: Though I do believe in predestination, I also believe that we must put out extreme effort toward things that bring us creative satisfaction. Want to learn to do taxidermy? Great, find a mentor or hop on youtube. Want to learn how to build a complicated AI model? Time to go back to school and get the computer science fundamentals locked down. Want to learn how to start a fire in the backcountry? Head to a wilderness school or start striking that flint!

You get the idea…

The point is, you have to make a conscious effort to navigate your personal ship toward whatever destination you want to go toward. You also have to accept the fact that you may wash up on the shores of a small atoll you couldn’t see along the way…

That atoll may be a better paradise than where you were originally trying to go, or it may be a place full of resources you didn’t know you needed to continue on your original journey. But, as an old time trapper in my little community was fond of saying, “Zach, only dead fish go with the flow.” (RIP Bob Lee) - So, pick a heading and steer your ship!

Daily Prompt: Are you listlessly floating through your life? What can you take hold of today to start steering your ship in the direction you want to go? Think of one small action you can take and write it down here:

Motivational Passage:

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you.

-1 Thessalonians 4:11

Rewilding Action: How long has it been since you started a fire? Given that in a survival situation this is often the most important aspect to surviving it’s important to know the core tenants of getting one started, and more importantly having the right tools. I always carry a small flint with me in the backcountry but have also been playing with some firestarters like Pyro Putty and Blackbeard’s Fire Starter. If you can, take some time this weekend to try and start a small fire and test your skill.

Snowy September day… using a fire at 10k feet to warm up some.

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Becoming an Outlaw...

Day 13: There is something special about the outlaw state of mind. No, I am not talking about the outlaws of old who were gunslingers and robbers, but the new age outlaws… You, the reader of this daily devotional, myself, and countless others who are bucking the system to a small degree to live life on their own terms.

Though we don’t have to go as far as Claude Dallas to espouse the outlaw persona, there is a beauty in pushing back against authority and societal expectations writ large. If you are a millennial, like myself, you were told in school to follow the “playbook” and everything would work out. You would get the education you needed (at a steep price) and everything else would magically fall into place… the family, the home, the satisfaction.

But, it turns out that was all a lie. As my generation came of age we were embroiled in a two front war (which some of my friends never came back from), we were hit with recessions, inflation, and an unstable job market. And you know what? We weren’t happy. But, despite the unhappiness, myself and so many people still kept pushing for that dream we were promised… Why?

The answer is that we weren’t cowboy enough to get what we really wanted. We had been put into cookie-cutter molds since childhood, and our creative and outlaw nature had been blunted for so long that we couldn’t see the forest through the trees. But, thankfully that is all changing! 

So many of us have finally pulled our heads out of the sand and see things for what they are and are adjusting our dreams and desires… but to attain those dreams of being self-sustaining, we have to embrace our innate outlaw nature that has laid dormant for most of our lives.

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Writing Prompt: Think about some of the most famous outlaws throughout history… Poets, gunslingers, revolutionaries, artists, etc… What characteristics of their nature speak to you? What positive mentalities could you start to adopt in your everyday life that may help you get the things you want out of building a sustainable lifestyle? Write them down here:

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Motivational Passage:

The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too.

- David Whyte

Rewilding Action: One of the big promises to my generation was that if you ever needed food it would be there in a grocery store. This has largely held true until the first chink in the armor was seen during the pandemic when the meat shelves were empty. So, one of our family “outlaw” approaches was to start thinking that food may not always be available, and we need to be prepared to feed ourselves. So, aside from hunting, we have started to explore freeze drying our leftover food to use on our backcountry adventures and to have as a backup in case we find ourselves in a spot without access to a grocery store.

The One Technique That Changed My Life...

Day 12: As an ex-suburbanite who traveled way too much around the world, I was surprised to find out that some of the traits I picked up to deal with that chaotic lifestyle could translate well to living in the woods. In particular, I am talking about box breathing.

I was first introduced to this technique in 2010 when I was living in Vienna, Austria as a young guy working at a big multi-national organization in an anti-terrorism unit. An Austrian police officer from my crossfit gym showed me this crazy guy on his phone, Mark Devine (founder of SEALfit), doing these deep breathing techniques and something he called combat yoga. Well, without thinking much of it, I paid the money for a SEALfit membership just to learn how to do this mythical breathing technique, and it turns out it is ridiculously simple and changed my life. Here, let’s do it together… 

Sit up straight in your chair and close your mouth. Through your nostrils take a long inhale for a four-count Mississippi. Good, now hold your filled lungs for another four-count Mississippi.

Now, slowlllly release all of the air in your lungs for a four-count Mississippi and when all of the air is gone, give an extra little muscle push to get everything out. Then, you guessed it, hold your completely empty lungs for another four-count Mississippi.

Close your eyes now and repeat this [box] cycle until you are calm, centered, and back on target.

That one technique I learned from the online course with Mark was worth its weight in gold. I use it everywhere and in almost every stressful situation I find myself in.

In my old life I would use it before jiu jitsu matches, when I was stuck in traffic, when my flights were delayed, or before any big presentation. It always got me back to center.

So, it should be no surprise that I found applications for it in my new lifestyle of off-grid living. Stuck on a mountain in inclement weather? Box breathe. Can’t figure out how to fix something that I broke? Box breathe. About to take a shot on an animal to feed my family? Box breathe. About to care for my pregnant wife who just cracked her skull open on a rock? Box breathe.

So, even if you aren’t living the off-grid lifestyle you dream of just yet, don’t disregard the things you do and learn to survive in your current suburban environment as useless for your future life… you never know what may be extremely applicable!

Mark Devine coaching box breathing.

Daily Prompt: What things or activities do you do today to cope with stress? Are these techniques or experiences something you could apply to any situation or lifestyle change? Take a moment to envision applying these skills in the future and write that down here:

Motivational Passage:

Physical and emotional states can be altered by changing the breathing pattern. 

-Wilhem Reich

Rewilding Action: Today’s action is simple. How much gasoline do you have on hand, and how much is currently in your vehicle? If you needed to get out of town, how far could you get? Take a little inventory and assess whether you have enough. Then, if you do have gasoline on hand, how long has it been sitting in that plastic container you bought at the gas station? Has it been weeks, months, or even years? If that’s the case, make sure you treat that long sitting gas with something like Stabil so that it is usable when you need it.

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We Should All Die Learning...

Buy the Turning Feral Book

Day 11: As someone new coming into the sustainability space there is such a vast ocean of knowledge to try and get your hands around. Then, figuring out what’s the most high-value thing to learn first can feel overwhelming. Add in all of the influencers pushing their particular specialty (e.g. self-defense, regenerative ag, homesteading, prepping, and hunting to name a few) and it can be downright exhausting before you even make it out of the gate!

So what to do? Well, I don’t have a carte blanche answer here because everyone is different. But for me and my family, we have a list that we are working on in priority order of what brings us joy and benefits our sustainability goals. We have started by being an inch deep and a mile wide over tons of subjects that give us an idea of how the concept works, and topics that catch our personal interest we make space for a deeper dive.

For me, trapping and hunting has taken the majority of my deep dive energy, where things like taxidermy, electrical work, tree-falling, and long range shooting have all remained more surface level. My wife has focused her deep dive energy more on construction-esque tasks, bread making, and backpacking/camping needs, with a myriad of other surface-level interests on her plate that she has been exploring.

When you put our efforts together we start to paint a broad sustainability picture that we are happy with, because as we age and our kids grow we know our interest areas will change, and we are OK with that. The overarching motivation for us is to always be learning, folks!

Example of some of the “inch deep” topics I have spent time on… Taxidermy!

Daily Prompt: What does your priority learning list look like? What areas of sustainability are you most interested in that you would like to deep dive into? What areas could you get by with just doing a veneer passing? Write them down here:

Motivational Passage: 

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

― Henry Ford

Rewilding Action: After you write down the list of things you want to learn, take some time to google information on your highest priority focus areas. If there are classes (in person or online) you can take to get some expert instruction, sign up! I for one am going to be (re) taking a great long range shooting course here soon to begin a deep dive into this interest area of mine.

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Sleep Around... It's Good for you.

Day 10: Ok, ok… you caught me experimenting with a click-baity headline, but hear me out… Sleeping around is good for you! No, not with other humans but sleeping around in different locations, specifically outdoors, can be a great way to get back to a more natural state. 

If you talk to any outdoors(wo)man long enough you may hear them rave about the naps they sneak in while sitting up in a tree stand or leaned up against a tree in the mountains. And… it's true! But, it’s not just enjoyable because these outdoors-loving folks are tired, there is actual science behind why it’s so enjoyable.

You see, it turns out that sleeping outdoors can do a number of beneficial things including resetting your circadian rhythm, boosting your immune system (especially when done in cold weather), and increasing mental well-being. Because of these benefits many cultures in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe still practice letting their babies nap outdoors in cold weather to boost their immune function. So, if you are stuck in a suburban rut and are looking for ways to increase your connection with nature, maybe you should try sleeping around some!

Babies taking a nice outdoor nap somewhere in Russia. My buddy Ross catching a mid-day snooze on the side of a Mountain at 8000ft.

Daily Prompt: Be honest, how long has it been since you have slept somewhere outside? Has it been weeks, months, or years? Think back to how you felt after the experience. Were you rejuvenated?:

Motivational Passage:

When you lie down, you will not be afraid. Your sleep will be sweet.

– Proverbs 3:24

Rewilding Action: Today’s action is going to be easy… plan to sleep around. This doesn’t have to be some grand adventure where you head deep in the woods to sleep on a bed of pine boughs, it can be something simple. Go outside on a sunny day and simply lay in the grass, or find a nice tree to lean up against and read a book. No matter where you decide to sleep around, just find a spot where you can comfortably nod off and take a nap while connected to the earth!

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Control the Inputs...

Day 9: There is a path. It’s a path laid out by something bigger than me and it’s taken me 35 years to finally give in to that power. To recognize that most things are truly outside of my control and the only thing I can control is my effort and relentlessness in pursuing the things that scratch the creative itches in my brain.

Leaning into recency bias for an example, myself and a friend hiked 10 miles into rugged country yesterday to get to a low pressure spot to bow hunt for deer. When we got there we found nothing, nada, zilch, and we were confused. It wasn’t until we started canvassing the place that we found very fresh wolf scat and a bunch of tracks - everything was blown out of that draw we worked so hard to get into. 

To be honest I, for a moment, had self defeating thoughts about choosing the wrong place and being an overall “unlucky” hunter, but quickly I realized that we were alone and experiencing a cool (but frustrating) part of nature. But, the peace I was able to find came from knowing that we had put out 100% effort to get there, making me realize that we dominated the parts of the hunt we had control over. 

Do I know how this “busted” trip and experience plays into the bigger plan God has for me? Not at all. Am I ok with that? You bet. And that mindset of accepting the unknown is key. It has helped me through some bigger life events recently, including losing my 9-5 job (twice in the last six months), struggling with a startup, and navigating fatherhood.

As a wrestling coach once said. “You control the input, God controls the output.” 

Go control your inputs!

Huge wolf prints… They are not small animals.

Daily Prompt: What areas of your life do you have control over? Are you putting in max effort, or are you calling it in on most days? Write down a few areas where you could uplevel your “input.”:

Motivational Passage:

“Where the legs have gone the hind legs must follow”

― Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murád

Rewilding Action: If you are planning to be out in nature for extended periods on your own turning feral journey, think about some phrases or motivational quotes that resonate with you. Start telling them to yourself all the time. Program your mind. These phrases repeated to yourself when you are alone, tired, or questioning your “why” can really help. A few I have used over the past 10 years come from several sources, but include, “Control your inputs,” “Not dead. Can’t quit,” and “Lookin’ good, feelin’ good, oughta be in Hollywood.”

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