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On Surviving & Reactivity
Survival & reactivity fall on one end of the spectrum, while thriving and proactivity fall on the other.
On Surviving & Reactivity
XXVI
2023.12.24
Meditations: 31/36
Merry Christmas Eve. No snow in Muskegon today. I prefer a white Christmas, but I think I’ll use the clear roads and paths to take a bike ride this morning. I’m trying to get outside more.
That’s a decision I’m making to thrive, and that’s what this post is all about: thriving.
Actually, it reads like it’s more about surviving, but that’s the basis for thriving, and, well, you have to start somewhere.
art
as the
spirit
wanes
the
form
appears.
Surviving As Necessary
Survival mode. It can feel foggy, dreamlike, distant. It’s reactive. School can be like that; take this test, do that homework assignment, go-go-go, don’t question it. Unfortunately, some relationships are like that, too, where the other person keeps coming up with the next crisis, the next make or break decision. If you’ve been with a person like that long enough, you might not feel like you have time to take a breath and calm down and evaluate what your actual priorities are.
It’s like playing defense in jiu-jitsu. If someone is on your back, trying to choke you, your first job is to not get choked. If you’re new, you probably aren’t thinking about how you can reverse a position on your opponent, nor should you be, because if your expected survival time without good defense is 2.5 seconds, you need to start by getting that survival time up to 5, 10, 30, 60 seconds. Now, you’ve got something to play with.
In other words, being in survival mode is the ultimate stress test. If you’re present enough to at least feel where each hit comes from, where the most pressing attack is happening, then you have a chance to not only deflect the attack, but to learn to deflect the attack.
If you’re doing it right, you’re not surviving. You’re learning to survive.
Surviving as Discomfort
When you’re on the defensive, a really easy mistake to make is confusing pain and discomfort with the threat of death.
If your mind is in the “don’t die” mode, and you get a cough and a headache at the same time, well, you might think it’s more than just a common cold.
The trap to avoid when surviving is knowing when discomfort is not actually indicating the threat of death, because a lot of the time, the only way out is through the pain and discomfort.
Your opponent is smashing your face with his chest because he can’t do anything else! He wants you to give up an underhook or expose your neck. It is uncomfortable, but really, you’re fine.
Having a lover leave you is fine. You are still alive. It doesn’t feel good, but that doesn’t mean you get to start drinking every night. That feels like survival, but it’s a trap. If she left you for a good reason, you’re certainly not going to fix it by becoming an alcoholic. And if she didn’t leave you for a good reason, then drinking is just making a good reason for the next one to leave you.
Learning to survive is not about finding the easy way out. It is making that first class of sacrifice, giving up the unfulfilling thing for whatever difficult thing will get you out of the situation. If you don’t make a practice of accepting the discomfort, you won’t just magically wake up and learn to do it one day.
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”
It’s about making a practice of keeping good form, even when you don’t want to, it’s setting up those good habits of making the tradeoffs that will build you rather than destroy you. If someone is bullying you, it’s about learning when to react (almost never) and when not to react (almost always). It’s keeping your calm under the uncomfortable pressure of deadlines and negative outside judgement. Those things are constant and uncontrollable, but your reaction to them is not.
Survival can feel like a grind. It can feel like hell. It can feel like someone yelling at you every day, and you learning to be indifferent. One attack after another. Relentless. A waterfall of pain. You’re moving through a brain fog, running into things and reacting to them as they come, unable to pick your own direction. But, if you start accepting the discomfort needed to stay in the game without taking the easy way out, you can start breathing. If you keep good form, you’re not in danger.
It’s the over reacting that will kill you.
Remember, discipline is the art of making hard things easy. Somewhere in there, that effort needed to stay alive becomes natural. Physically, it’s still difficult, but not as difficult as it was. And it’s certainly not as mentally taxing… you don’t have to think quite as much about how you can survive… you just do it. You’ve bought yourself the time to think and wonder: what’s next?
Surviving as the Opposite of Thriving
Survival is the absence of death, thriving is the flourishing of life. Two sides to the same coin.
“Thrival isn't a word!” I care more about linguistic symmetry than I do the dictionary.
Survival brings to mind death. Death is to be avoided. So, you have all of the negative things here. Your mind is on the side of the spectrum that it doesn’t want to be, so you think of things that are the opposite of death: not dying, staying alive 5 more seconds, drinking water, eating food. You’re reacting to threats.
Thriving brings life to mind. Life is to be enjoyed and cherished. You have these positive things that you want to pursue: passion, purpose, community. You’re proactively going out and creating value, having an impact in the world.
Is this maybe just Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs flipped on its side? Roughly, yes. The key point here, though, is that when you’re surviving, you’re focused on not dying, which is inherently reactive to dying. It’s a negative… it’s a how do I NOT do the thing that I don’t want to do (die). When you’re thriving, you’re focused on life, which is a positive… it’s a how do I DO the thing I want to do (live).
Thriving
I’m still learning how to thrive myself, but I think an element of it is being a little unreasonable and idealistic.
There’s something about finding the principles that would make the world prosperous for everyone and adhering to them, even when it’s difficult. Back to sacrifices and tradeoffs: it’s CHOOSING to make sacrifices and trade offs to make the world a better place and/or specialize. You don’t necessarily have to, but you do it anyways.
When you’re surviving, the tradeoffs are made for you. “Oh, if I don’t do this, I don’t die? Cool!” Or worse, and more insidious: “If I drink this, or keep sitting on my phone, or smoke this, or take this, I don’t have to confront the underlying pain of living a half life?” In a seemingly forced trade off, you feel like you have no say in the matter.
Thriving starts to come when you’ve made those low order trade offs, when you’ve learned to confront that perpetual pain and overcome it, rather than just taking the path of least resistance that will find you in a place of defeat again and again and again.
Surviving as Foundation
If thriving is so good, why did we even talk about surviving?
Because you have to survive to thrive.
You can’t jump from not knowing how to defend a choke to being able to break your opponent’s arm in 10 seconds.
Well, technically, you can, but that is a terrifically fragile position to be in, and we don’t like to optimize for fragile positions, now do we? If you can’t defend a choke, even if you have a cool trick to beat your opponent once, it’s not sustainable. If they reverse you, you’ll have nothing to fall back on.
It’d be like only learning the 2, 3 and 4 move checkmates in chess. If those don’t work… well, good luck!
If you don’t learn to survive and build up a rigorous confidence in it, you may be in survival mode without even knowing it. I’ve seen people who constantly NEED to be on the attack (bullies) because once you reverse them, they have nothing to fall back on. You’re being attacked (emotionally) by someone who has no sense of defense (emotionally).
Mastery does not involve needing to do anything. Mastery involves peak performance regardless of external conditions or your opponents decisions. It is a cool confidence in your ability to survive, which, if it’s real and true, is always hard won.
Mastery
Again, we glean the surface of a topic that warrants another post, but the development of mastery is a nuance to the proactive vs reactive part of our discussion, here.
Masters of any craft that involves another participant, whether it be negotiation, sales, sports, martial arts, poker, or war, they all know how to make their opponent think they are being proactive, when really, it is a reaction to the Master’s bait. In this way, the Master’s own proactivity transcends the opponents proactivity, because the opponent’s choice in the matter was illusory to begin with.
It’s the salesman who speaks 20% of the time and spends the other 80% of the time watching his lead talk himself into the purchase, or the Judoka who takes their opponent’s aggression and throws them on the ground with it.
I don’t think I’m there with any art, yet. But I’m working on it. The point is, though, that even this is based off of an intimate understanding of what survival is like; the Master can retreat to a vulnerable position to defeat their opponent, because the Master has supreme confidence to not only survive, but to thrive in the position, regardless of what happens.
They’ve lived in a state of survival, they are intimate with it, and sometimes, they return there. But they also know what is needed to thrive.
The New Year is upon us. I’ve been reviewing the evolution of my own goal setting over time; perhaps next week we’ll talk more about the proactive nature of life, focusing on making decisions and setting targets that help us thrive.
Who knows.
Merry Christmas & Live Deeply,