Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

by Laurence Gonzales

Of each particular thing, ask: “What is it in itself, in its own construction?” —Marcus Aurelius

There are things you can’t control, so you’d better know how you’re going to react to them.

The first time I heard a briefing like that, I was lost. But that’s part of the point: only those who get it get it. A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.

“You’re at a quarter mile and someone asks you who your mother is: you don’t know. That’s how focused you are. Okay, call the ball. Now it’s a knife fight in a phone booth. And remember: full power in the wire. Your IQ rolls back to that of an ape.”

Be aware that you’re not all there. You are in a profoundly altered state when it comes to perception, cognition, memory, and emotion. He was trying to keep them calm while letting them face reality. He’d seen people die. He knew the power of the horse, and these were his precious jet jockeys.

Reason is tentative, slow, and fallible, while emotion is sure, quick, and unhesitating.

play puts a person in touch with his environment, while laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable.

Survival, then, is about being cool. It’s about laughing with an attitude of bold humility in the face of something terrifying. It’s about knowing the deepest processes of the brain, even if, as nonscientists, we can explain them only through the darkest humor imaginable.

It’s an old habit. Remarque wrote, “We make grim, coarse jests about it, when a man dies, then we say he has nipped off his turd, and so we speak of everything; that keeps us from going mad; as long as we take it that way we maintain our own resistance.”

“Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.”

We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel.

“Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little.”

“we must, of course, make a judgment, even if only a tentative and temporary one. Making a judgment means we create a ‘mental model’ of an expected universe…. You are actually creating a world that is congruent with your interpretation, even though it may be the wrong world.”

In nature, adaptation is important; the plan is not. It’s a Zen thing. We must plan. But we must be able to let go of the plan, too.

The practice of Zen teaches that it is impossible to add anything more to a cup that is already full. If you pour in more tea, it simply spills over and is wasted. The same is true of the mind. A closed attitude, an attitude that says, “I already know,” may cause you to miss important information. Zen teaches openness.

The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.

“Be silent; for there is great danger that you will immediately vomit up what you have not digested.”

On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use. —Epictetus

The research suggests five general stages in the process a person goes through when lost. In the first, you deny that you’re disoriented and press on with growing urgency, attempting to make your mental map fit what you see. In the next stage, as you realize that you’re genuinely lost, the urgency blossoms into a full-scale survival emergency. Clear thought becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive, even dangerous. In the third stage (usually following injury or exhaustion), you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map. (It is a misguided strategy, for there is no such place now: You are lost.) In the fourth stage, you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally, as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict. In the final stage, as you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then it won’t matter where you are.

If the object of the game is survival, that will do. Or, as my father used to tell me about flying, “A good landing is any landing that you can walk away from.”

I couldn’t help thinking, then, of the Zen concept of the beginner’s mind, the mind that remains open and ready despite years of training. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”

Plan the flight and fly the plan. But don’t fall in love with the plan. Be open to a changing world and let go of the plan when necessary so that you can make a new plan. Then, as the world and the plan both go through their book of changes, you will always be ready to do the next right thing.

“Don’t get comfortable,” he advised. “Get confident.”

Peter Leschak speaks of “Standard Fire Order #10: Stay alert, keep calm, think clearly, act decisively.” According to this directive, the best way to meet an emergency is with sharp senses (to gather information), a clear mind (to analyze the information), and bold action; add to these humor (to handle strong emotions). Steven Callahan was able to do all of those things.

“I’ve got to do the best I can,” he told himself. “The very best. I cannot shirk or procrastinate. I cannot withdraw…I have sometimes fooled other people. But Nature is not such a dolt.”

Epictetus wrote: “You must either cultivate your own ruling faculty, or external things; you must either exercise your skill on internal things or on external things; that is, you must either maintain the position of a philosopher or that of a common person.”

The world won’t adapt to me. I must adapt to it.

There is an old Zen story about a young man who passionately wants to become a master swordsman. He goes to the Kundo master and begs to be taught, but the master puts him to work in the garden instead. Every time the student isn’t looking, the master sneaks up behind him and whacks him with a stick. The student is terribly frustrated, and this goes on for months, then years. No matter what the student does, he can’t seem to sense when the master is behind him, and he is constantly covered with bruises. But then one day, the student is in the garden, as usual, hoeing and weeding, and the master sneaks up behind him. He swings. The student ducks. The master misses. The student is overjoyed. He leaps up and shouts, “Now will you teach me swordsmanship?” “Now you don’t need swordsmanship,” the master says.

Days stolen are always sweeter than days given.

Epictetus said, “And let silence be the general rule, or let only what is necessary be said, and in few words. And rarely and when the occasion calls shall we say something.”

So with my father. The lesson of survival that I took from his story was not that he was so lucky as to fall 27,000 feet and not die. It was that he had to have the strength to go on and live sixty more years after losing his beloved brothers, his crew, after breaking his body into so many pieces, after prison camp.

The perfect adventure shouldn’t be that much more hazardous in a real sense than ordinary life, for that invisible rope that holds us here can always break. We can live a life of bored caution and die of cancer. Better to take the adventure, minimize the risks, get the information, and then go forward in the knowledge that we’ve done everything we can.

I adhere to what my daughter Amelia calls the Gutter Theory of Life. It goes like this: You don’t want to be lying in the gutter, having been run down by a bus, the last bit of your life ebbing away, and be thinking, “I should have taken that rafting trip…” or, “I should have learned to surf…” or “I should have flown upside down—with smoke!” Pete Conrad was the third man to walk on the moon. He died in a motorcycle accident on an ordinary day. It took him a while to die as he went to the hospital. I wonder what he was thinking. I hope it was: I did it all.