Skills We Forgot We Needed
As I lean deeper into stewardship and from-scratch living this year, I've found myself pondering bigger questions:
How did ordinary living — growing food, making clothes, baking bread, knowing the seasons — become extraordinary?
How did we move from communities where everyone knew a little bit of everything, to a world where most of us know only a narrow slice of how to survive?
A recent podcast I listened to, Breaking Down Collapse, explored these ideas in an episode titled "Building Up Resilience: Why We Need Resilience" (August 25, 2023). They painted a vivid picture: A farmer in the 1800s, working his fields, would never have worried about a solar flare. It simply would not have affected him. His life was powered by sun, seed, rain, hand tools, animals, and human hands — not satellites or servers.
Today, a single disruption — a solar flare, a supply chain breakdown, a power outage — can ripple through technology and transportation systems, and suddenly everyday life feels shaky.
We've become specialists — extraordinarily good at very specific things, but often lacking the wide and adaptable skill set that once allowed ordinary people to thrive through uncertain seasons.
🌿 Specialization and the Fragility It Creates
Specialization isn’t evil. It brought comfort, innovation, and safety. It allowed people to dream bigger, live longer, reach higher.
But in the process, we outsourced so many of the basic skills that once kept households and communities strong. We became, in a strange way, more fragile — more dependent on distant systems we cannot see, much less fix.
We stopped growing food. We stopped preserving food. We stopped fixing things when they broke. We stopped making what we could, with what we had.
We learned how to work a smartphone but forgot how to darn a sock. We mastered ordering groceries online but lost the patience to nurture a tomato seed into fruit.
🌿 Stewardship: A Different Kind of Resilience
There are people who respond to these realities with fear — by becoming radical survivalists, building bunkers, and stockpiling supplies for imagined disasters.
But that's not what I'm called to.
I'm not preparing for collapse. I'm preparing for stewardship.
I'm not aiming for isolation. I'm aiming for resilience.
Not to wall ourselves off — but to root ourselves deeper into faith, family, and a life-giving home.
The longing underneath it all is simple: I want to be faithful with what I have been given. I want to be a good steward of this home, this family, this plot of earth, this daily bread.
If I can learn to bake bread, preserve tomatoes, sew a seam, grow herbs, mend a broken drawer — it’s not just about saving money or chasing nostalgia. It’s about building a life that is a little stronger, a little steadier, a little more beautiful and capable — no matter what comes.
🌿 Ordinary Skills, Extraordinary Strength
For generations, what we now call "homesteading" wasn't a lifestyle choice. It was simply life.
Everyone needed as many skills as possible: to grow, gather, barter, build, mend, fix, create.
Ordinary life demanded wide competence and daily adaptability.
And while modern life no longer requires those same skills to survive, there’s a quiet strength that stirs in the heart when you reclaim even one small piece of that heritage.
A loaf of bread. A stitched hem. A pantry shelf lined with jars you filled yourself.
None of it shouts. None of it demands applause. But it strengthens the soul — and the home — in ways that no convenience ever could.
🌿 Skills Worth Reclaiming
It can feel overwhelming to think about all the skills that once came naturally to households and communities. But rather than focusing on what we’ve lost, we can begin to gently ask:
"What small piece could I take back into my hands?"
Skills worth reclaiming might look like:
🍞 Food and Kitchen:
Baking bread without a machine
Cooking from scratch with basic ingredients
Preserving food through canning, drying, or fermenting
Foraging for wild foods safely
Growing and saving seeds from heirloom gardens
🛠️ Home and Repair:
Mending clothes and sewing simple projects
Basic carpentry and home repairs
Sharpening knives and tools
Repairing furniture or reupholstering worn pieces
🪴 Garden and Land:
Composting and nurturing soil
Raising backyard chickens or small livestock
Managing water conservation naturally
Understanding herbal remedies and simple natural medicine
🮺 Household Arts:
Washing laundry by hand when needed
Knitting, crocheting, or quilting
Making soap, candles, or household cleaners from scratch
🛡️ Community and Soft Skills:
Bartering fairly and building local trust
Teaching others through mentorship and example
Offering hospitality with open hands and simple meals
Holding traditions and stories to pass along wisdom
We don’t have to master every skill. We don’t have to live off-grid or become survivalists.
🌿 We simply need to remember that tending a few small, ordinary skills — patiently, faithfully, lovingly — weaves resilience into the fabric of home and community.
Each skill we reclaim is a thread pulled back into the tapestry of an extraordinary ordinary life.
🌿 A Gentle Invitation
I'm not saying we all need to move off-grid or grow wheat fields to survive.
But maybe — just maybe — we could start learning again.
Maybe we could reverse engineer the life we want from the fragments of the one we have.
Maybe we could each pick one small skill and tuck it into our hands and hearts this year.
Learn to bake the bread. Learn to fix the torn pocket. Learn to grow the herbs. Learn to knit the baby blanket. Learn to sew the button back on. Learn to patch the hole in the jeans. Learn to tighten the wobbly leg on the chair. Learn to repair the car (or at least the simple things). Learn to replace the worn-out upholstery. Learn to repurpose the old dresser into something new.
Not because we're afraid. Not because we're aiming for self-sufficiency perfection. But because we are reclaiming the beautiful, wide, ordinary wisdom that was never meant to be lost.
Because skills are resilience. Because stewardship is strength. Because ordinary life — tended with love — is still extraordinary.
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