Stoic

Definition: A person who can endure pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining.

The capacity to be a stoic in emergencies like floods, earthquakes, wars, calamities of all kinds might be a good thing. However, in this day and age to go through one's life like this all the time usually only makes it a short and crazy life.

This was how my Dad taught me stoicism. He might not have realized it at the time but it was real.

I had fallen about 9 feet backwards off a boulder and hit my head. Looking back now I had some sort of concussion but we were several miles away from my Dad's truck. This was about 1958 when I was 9 or 10. I started throwing up which is one of the signs of potential concussion. My Dad's reaction was, "Get up. Let's go!" I remember saying, "Dad. I'm throwing up and I have a bad headache!" Dad simply said, "Get up or I'll leave you here whining." So, I got up and walked while I threw up while walking with a bad headache while the world spun around me.

Looking back this was the only thing he knew to do. There were no cellphones then. There wasn't a radio transceiver nearby. I was too big at 10 for him to carry out of there. We were about 3 miles from our truck. So, either I walked out of that canyon or he went out without me to bring back my body later.
So, from his point of view he had to force me to walk on out of their on my own steam. This was just the very basic kind of survival that his Dad had taught him too. If you weren't dead you found a way to drag your A-- out of wherever you were. His Dad was a hunter so obviously he had been wounded with his Dad too and this is how his Dad had handled such wounds too.

My capacity from those kinds of days with my Dad has enabled me to be often the most valuable person in an emergency short of actual professional emergency responders like firemen and police and paramedics actually hired and trained for that job. I have always found that I have been the one that wasn't screaming or crying or getting hysterical in emergencies because of the training my father gave me at times like the one I shared.

This doesn't mean that later when I'm alone and everything has been taken care of that I don't sometimes fall apart or even cry to process the stoicism that I needed to save the people in those crucial moments. It just means that I always have had what it takes to save people no matter what emergency I have been faced with. My father taught me to turn off my emotions like a soldier or hunter and to take care of business no matter what. I suppose it is sort of the western cowboy kind of capacity to do whatever it takes no matter what even if it might mean dying to save people in emergencies. This was how I was trained as a child. So as an adult I could endure anything I had to.

Since I have been a 6 foot 5 inch person this has sometimes scared people who don't have this ability. So I have learned to soften this stance if non-threatening people start to freak out, especially children. But wherever I have been on earth knowing how to be stoic whenever necessary has often meant the difference between life and death for myself and others. So, it is a very useful skill. However, if one is safe and warm and among people one loves to stay in this state of stoicism can be very unproductive. So, knowing when to turn stoicism on and knowing how to temporarily deactivate it can lead to a very happy useful and productive life.