Systems Check: Preparing for Life’s Adventure

Before you begin any great journey—especially one that leads into the wild within—it’s wise to check your systems.

In Systems Check: Preparing for Life’s Adventure, aired on February 9, 2025, Michael Douglas offers listeners of Dear Grandchildren: A Tracker’s Tale a grounding pre-flight checklist. But this isn’t about gear or maps—it’s about your inner terrain. Have you slept well? Are you hydrated? Have you fueled yourself with food that sustains—not just fills?

This episode reminds us that survival skills don’t start with flint or fire—they start with tending to the foundations: sleep, water, calories. From there, we’re invited to reclaim something often lost in the noise of modern life: sacred silence. Not just the absence of sound, but a stillness deep enough to hear the subtle rhythms of the world—and yourself.

Through Michael’s lens, primitive skills like tracking become more than techniques. They’re tools of focus and layers of perception—moving us from simple recognition (“a skunk track”) to deep narrative (“an older male, cautious, shaped by experience”). These are ancestral skills shaped by stillness, activated through awareness, and rooted in resilience.

For anyone seeking to shift from reactive to intentional living, this episode offers a blueprint. It’s not about retreat—it’s about realignment. The systems-check approach is both metaphor and method: a ceremony of preparation that readies you for meaningful movement—whether into the forest or into a clearer version of yourself.

Listen to the full episode and begin building your own system of inner and outer readiness.
👉 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dear-grandchildren-a-trackers-tale/id1786276274?i=1000690596754