Beyond survival mode

There’s a turn in Dougal Robertson’s Survive The Savage Sea that really touched me. It comes on the family’s 25th day as castaways: the sea calms down and there’s a “glorious sunset and a peacefulness of the spirit.” The group takes turns singing songs to each other. And then:

I felt that we had already gone beyond thinking in terms of survival. We had started living from the sea as an adapted way of life… we no longer thought of rescue as one of the main objectives of our existence; we were...