What’s the most underrated life skill?

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I was going to say that life skills need an update perhaps, that today it’s more important to know what all the keys on the keyboard do than it is to know how to light a fire in the woods. But that’s more of a survival skill than it is a life skill.

Although one hundred, oof no, two hundred? years ago, lighting a fire probably was a basic life skill.

I was just thinking about my “little house on the prairie-esque” childhood the other day when I was practicing gratitude as I sipped on my first coffee. I was being thankful for the fact that because my house has a programmable thermostat, it’s set to cool off a bit while we sleep but then warm back up by the time I get out of bed in the morning.

In my childhood, up until grade nine, while we did have electric baseboard heat in the bedrooms, our main heat source was the wood stove in the dining area. I’m not sure those baseboard heaters were ever turned on to be honest, well I guess in winter they would have to be.

In any case I recall that when we woke up in the morning, the floors were very cold, in any room. There was no carpet, only linoleum.

Dad would already be up of course, but sometimes just, and we’d hover around watching him get the fire going to warm the place up. That’s all I remember, it must’ve warmed up quickly once the fire was burning.

Just now, I thought to myself, well what if he was away, who would have started the fire? But guess what, he was never away. Not even once. Isn’t that funny. He was a farmer and he liked sticking close to home. So that means every single morning without fail for my entire childhood, he was there.

That’s also something to be grateful for.