By Thine Own Hands
22 Sep
“They were for all practical purposes alone in the frozen Antarctic seas. It had been very nearly a year since they had last been in contact with civilization. Nobody in the outside world knew they were in trouble, much less where they were. They had no radio transmitter with which to notify any would-be rescuers, and it is doubtful that any rescuers could have reached them even if they had been able to broadcast an SOS. It was 1915, and there were no helicopters, no Weasels, no Sno-Cats, no suitable planes.
Thus their plight was naked and terrifying in its simplicity. If they were to get out—they had to get themselves out.”
― Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
There comes a time, where the ability to navigate and chart a course through hardship comes down to you. If you want to survive, thrive, overcome, to escape - then the path forward will be constructed by thine own hands.
And hardship is a continuum - it doesn’t have to be some epic fight for life, it might be the loss of a job and identity, a relationship collapse, health setback, or just the cumulative toll of a thousand tiny battles.
Modern society has ‘gifted’ us with all manner of safety nets - but from time to time, they simply won’t be accessible, or appropriate, or even functional. For many, those safety nets have become hammocks in which we can reside, held aloft by the fallacy of never ending prosperity, the illusion of my unalienable right to comfort and the endemic rewarding of short-termism.
There are the consequences. Life sometimes throws us curve balls that require you to simply deal, in the moment, with the tools at your disposal.
So what can we do, now, to develop that toolkit - to deepen our capacity and broaden our options.
Here’s some thoughts.
Your philosophy matters - this is the mental lens through which you see the world. That lens is tempered thru the emotional and physical conditioning of your life up until this point. Have you taken the approach of taking the easy choice, the soft option or have you built a degree of fortitude. A little self discipline here, built some self belief there by doing something you thought was beyond you. You don’t have to be David Goggins but if you’ve treated the world around you as your personal DoorDash, expecting the universe to accommodate your choices and whims without consequence or concern for anything beyond the next five minutes then you’re in for a shock. Everything you do, every day, is an exercise in conditioning. You are training the system - whether you have actively chosen to or not. So accept that it is happening and then act accordingly.
Your brain is a time machine - I came across this concept from the physicist Carl Rovelli. The brain is a time machine - building bridges from the past into the present and then into the future. It takes memories across a myriad of time scales and uses them to predict the future, what will happen, how you will respond, what you are capable of. The brain predicts and therefore reinforces the future outcome based on past behaviour. If those past behaviours display a depth of capacity, reserves, propensity for motion, for anti-fragility - then it will predict a future of adaptation, of survival, of victory. If your past behaviours have shown none of those things then how can we expect an outcome of a different ilk. Your past behaviours and attitudes will predict your future outcomes, the mind will have it no other way.
The lone wolf dies but the pack survives - if you fall down the rabbit hole of the #socials you can be led to believe that there are only two options for existence. You’re either a rugged lone wolf, standing stoically in the eye of the storm - or you are ensconced in the warm embrace of a never ending summer, with a cadre of smiling beautiful friends and a WFH job that requires you to be on a laptop poolside for three minutes a day. Neither of these are real. Like everything the truth lies in the middle - modernity has quietly robbed us of the very thing that guaranteed our survival in the first place - a real and present tribe. You don’t need to be a Leonidas-esque stoic warrior. And your friends don’t need to have stepped straight out of central casting. They should be flawed and real and challenging and honest and present and open. Sometimes they’ll hurt and sometimes they’ll heal but they are there and it’s a two way street, or even a five way intersection, it’s dynamic and we all have a role to play. Find a tribe - build a tribe, move tribes, tribes work when everyone carries some load, when there are standards and expectations and when you gather around the fire but look out into the dark. Find real friends and lean on them, and allow them to lean on you. They are part of your toolkit.
And read Alfred Lansing’s epic retelling of Shackleton’s Adventure, and realise those extraordinary men were just normal folk. Not superheroes, or Special Forces or genetically gifted athletes. They were very much working class, even a stowaway - and yet they did the completely and utterly unthinkable.