Getting mentally organized

I need to get organized, and I’m not talking about sorting papers and decluttering my home, though I need to do that too — oy, do I! No, I’m talking about mental organization.

In the past month or so — since Earth Day, really — I’ve been obsessively reading everything I can about how to reduce my impact on the world. And man, there is a LOT to read.

The thing is, in order to a] meet the 90% reduction challenge in the next year and b] prepare for what I believe is the coming collapse of our economy, I need to learn survival skills that pretty much everyone knew 100 years ago. And I need to learn fast, because nobody knows when the shit will hit the fan.

I need to learn these things not so much for my own survival — I am 60, after all, and not in the best health; I probably don’t have more than 10 or 15 years left — but for my kids. I can’t talk or force them into this — they’re not ready yet — but I can learn these skills, model them, and pass them along when they are ready. My family is really going to need me when things get bad, so I’m feeling a real sense of urgency here.

And, I don’t know what else to call it, scatteredness. It’s all too much to process, and that has led to a certain, shall we say, paralysis. What should I do first? How do I do it? I don’t know enough. I’m too sick/old/tired to do this. Better take another nap.

What to do? Make lists, of course! Here are some of the skills I’m trying to learn or brush up on:

• gardening for food on my apartment balcony [try, try again, right?]
• worm composting on said balcony
• cooking from scratch [including things like almond milk and yogurt to reduce store-bought packaging]
• preserving food
• sewing/knitting/mending [thank goodness I learned to sew as a kid and recently taught myself to knit]
• repairing things instead of replacing them
• recycling [not so much a skill as a habit to cultivate]
• water conservation [another much-needed habit here in drought-ridden SoCal]

I’ll be adding to the list as I think of things. Any suggestions? Links to tutorials welcome!