52. SURVIVAL
I told her once I wasn’t good at anything. She told me survival is a talent.
- Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
In a lot of ways, Steven Pressfield’s philosophy of ‘Do The Work,’ embodies everything it takes to meet our goals, whether that’s personal improvement or helping our communities become more resilient in the face of climate change. As long as you show up, the theory goes, success will follow and there’s a degree of truth in that belief. For me as a writer, a blank page is the surest sign of failure and so to do my work, I write each day, even if it’s only the ten minutes in the morning I set aside for free-flow writing drills.
But like we’ve established, hard work only gets you so far and, at some point, to make progress we need to work smarter, not just harder. There are few situations where this is better illustrated than in survival situations. People often think that those who survive natural disasters and accidents do so through sheer grit, determination, and natural ability alone. While that may be partially true, there’s at least one other factor, which is the ability to recognize and adapt to changes in reality, as opposed to trying to force reality to meet our expectations1. Like that special operations unit in Afghanistan who worked so hard to capture a Taliban commander, and then failed because they couldn’t see reality had changed, the ability to adapt to a changing world is also important.
Consider the story about two hikers who get lost in the woods.
The first one knows exactly where he is, more or less. He knows he’ll get back on track over the next hill, so he keeps going. Only when he gets to that hill, he discovers it might actually be the next hill he had in mind. So, he keeps going. And going. And going. And by the time he accepts he’s well and truly lost, well, now he’s really lost. By this point, he’s also tired, both physically and mentally, and less prepared for what follows.
The second hiker also thinks she knows where she is, more or less. The difference between her and the first hiker is that she’s more open to the idea that her reality has changed. As her environment begins to no longer match her mental picture about where she is, she stops to consider the possibility that she’s lost. When she crests that first ‘next’ hill to find herself still not where she expected, she’s more willing to embrace her new reality. So, instead of continuing to bash through the bush, wasting valuable time and energy ‘bending the map2,’ she can work on a new plan that better fits that reality, like finding shelter or food.
Let’s put it this way. There’s a whole industry of self-help coaches who say that getting up early is the key to success. “Accomplish more before 8 am than most people accomplish in a day!” they’ll say, and that fits nicely with what I was told in the military. So as a writer with a full-time job, that’s what I did. I got up two hours earlier than normal to write and, sure enough, I got work done. Except I actually kind of needed those two hours of sleep and, over time, I got irritable and lazy and confused because that’s what happens when you’re sleep deprived. I was surviving, if you can call it that, but it wasn’t sustainable in the long term and I had to change to ensure I could keep going.
So too with serving others, especially when it comes to something as important as preparing our communities to adapt to climate change. If we take on more than we can manage, if we do not adjust to the real world around us, we won’t be able to last. Hard work, preparation, and seeing the world for what it is are great, but to achieve our goals, we must also be able to adapt.
To adapt successfully, we must have some of the same traits as entrepreneurs, we must be flexible and able to innovate, and also be tolerant of uncertainty3. What’s more, we must be informed about the urgency of climate impacts, understand what successful adaptations might look like and, above all, be engaged in finding solutions4. Thankfully, there are a number of organizations where these skills can be learned and applied in relation to local, regional and global challenges, such as the Global Center on Adaptation, which aims to help scale adaptation solutions to create a climate-resilient world5.
As with so many things, the tools are out there, we just need to have the willingness and awareness to change our plans.
Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why, New York, W.W. Norton & Company: 2017.
Ibid.
Ramananda Singh and Habib Rahman, “Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs,” in International Journal of Scientific Research, Vol 2: 11, 2013.
Sander Chan, Srishti Singh, Kevin Chang, Parth Tailor, Madhavi Joshi, Mishel Mohan, Joshua Amponsem. (2021). Young People and Drivers and Barriers to Climate Adaptation Action. Report. Global Center on Adaptation (GCA)/Centre for Environment Education (CEE)/Kai Analytics/Foundation for Environmental Education (FEE), Rotterdam / Ahmedabad / Vancouver / Copenhagen, https://gca.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Young-People-and-Drivers-and-Barriers-to-Climate-Adaptation-Action.pdf, accessed 5 Jun 2023.
Global Center on Adaptation, ‘About Us,’ gca.org, https://gca.org/about-us/, accessed 25 Jul 2022.