A person either does whatever it takes to survive or they don't

 Survival often is not about what is good or bad. Survival often is about doing whatever it takes to survive.

I can remember growing up and though I really liked my Dad there were things that I didn't agree with him about. So, my attitude was more like "What do I need to survive everything in my life?"

And telling my parents about everything that was going on inside me wasn't something I felt I could do and survive my life.

I found starting at age 5 when they gave me a bicycle that I could get on my bicycle and be a block or a mile from home often either alone or with a friend and I felt free as a bird when I did this.

It's true that there often were turf wars between children or young adults even then in the 1950s where a person might grab you off your bicycle and beat you up for no real reason but that you were there and were a stranger to them or they might allow their dog to attack you also.

But, I found generally speaking that I liked the idea of being wild and free like a bird and my fear of other people I could usually manage and I could always pedal really fast if people were chasing me for any reason at all.

I'm trying to get at something really important here and I'm not really sure I'm succeeding at this point.

But, basically in life, if you don't do whatever it takes to survive at each and every age then you don't.

In order to survive your life you have to reject the put downs of others even your parents and relatives

Most people, (especially your relatives) might mean well and only want the best for you. However, often they are not trained in any way that supports this really. So, though relatives can be a source of strength they can also be a source of a person's self destruction in some cases too if you believe things they say about you that in your heart you know are not true.

So, one of the biggest elements to long term survival in a human body on earth is to learn who you are and what you are really capable of. You need to define who you are not others in the end. It's true we all need help to get to around 13 to 15 years old so we can begin to design ourselves as adults. But, if you let others design your future often this is a fatally flawed idea.

For me, one of the main reasons I'm still alive is I had to reject ideas in people around me that I could not live with.

It's sort of like you are standing on a train platform in a train station and waiting for a train. If someone you trust says "Jump onto the train track" do you jump onto the train track and get hit by that train?

Life is sort of like this. You have to trust your own instincts in life about what you actually can survive.

If someone says, "Jump off this cliff into the water 100 feet below!" Do you do this?

Being able to choose what will work for you and to stay away from  what won't is the key to survival.

It's hard enough to survive and grow up even if your parents are good and decent people:

 Even with Good parents and a father who always financially supported me I nearly died many times growing up in the 1950s from Whooping cough, accidents including a concussion which gave me night time seizures from ages 10 to 15 including two times people a little older than me tried to kill me.  

What I'm trying to say here is that even if you have good parents (this was the 1950s) even then you likely only had a 50 50 chance or less of surviving to be 30 years old.

Once you survive to 30 now most people can expect to live until at least 90 if they make it to 30 to begin with.

But, trying to even make it to 20 was an extremely difficult thing growing up in the 1950s as a boy or a girl then.

Without abortions legal in many of the red states women will start to die like flies in Red States. So, you are bound to see women moving (as soon as they can) to a Blue state where they have equal rights to men.

Because in Red States now women are only slaves with less rights than children if they don't have legal access to abortions.

Survival

Just to do something different in a new direction I typed in "Survival" into Firefox just now. What came up was a kit that will supposedly feed 2 people for one week or one person for two weeks. It tok me back to around 1980 when friends of mine were burying food on their land in 50 gallon drums because people in their 20s and 30s then believed the U.S. government was going to financially collapse from getting so in debt through the Viet Nam war.

However, what we didn't know then is that the U.S. had loaned so much money and goods to the rest of the world to survive the mess of World war II to the point where we were literally the ONLY major power on earth not completely devastated by World War II left.

So, the U.S. became "Santa Claus" to the rest of the world by loaning them goods and money to rebuild. This is one reason why the U.S. got so wealthy during the 1950s and 1960s because we made so much money rebuilding the whole world right after world War II.

So, in 1980 instead of the U.S. going bankrupt, the nations of the world that had recovered and who were grateful that the U.S. had helped them so much loaned us money so the U.S. government didn't go bankrupt after all from the complete waste of money spent in Viet nam and 50,000 deaths of U.S. servicemen there as well as countless PTSD victims some of whom are still today walking the streets talking to themselves and homeless.

I felt at the time pretty stupid in not understanding this dynamic of just how grateful the rest of the world was for the U.S. to rescue them from complete oblivion which would have taken most countries back almost literally to the Stone age after World War II if we hadn't been there for them like we were.

Survival

Survival is actually about being kind enough to yourself so you actually want to be alive.

I don't think I fully knew this in my 20s yet. Then survival was more about pleasing family or girlfriends or friends or relatives. It was never really about just pleasing myself enough so I actually wanted to be alive.

So, from about age 21 to 24 I didn't want to be alive at all unless I was walking along the beach, or hiking in the mountains or skiing or backpacking with friends.

But, most of the time I would have preferred just being dead.

However, I couldn't do that to my parents. They had been very good parents and had been good to me growing up and I had to honor them. And by honoring them by staying alive when I most wanted to be dead eventually got me to the place where I started honoring myself and what I really needed too.

The first thing I needed was to separate myself from my childhood religion. However, doing that was one of the causes of me becoming suicidal for several years. The next thing I needed to do was to separate from my girlfriend from that religion. At the time this wouldn't have made any sense to me at all. However, when she told me she wanted to be in a celibate marriage with me without any children I had no trouble realizing this potential marriage was never going to work for me.

So, this choice that I was strong enough to make to break up with someone who I was very much in love with before we both destroyed our lives and came to hate each other (like many marriages do), and instead face being suicidal for several years was very brave of me and at the time a suicidal thing for me to do.

However, I figured being in a miserable marriage without physical intimacy or children, I realized death for me was a better choice than that one.

So, without realizing it I chose life over my slow death at that point.

I always have been very good about making good decisions.

However, emotionally surviving those good decisions is another thing entirely.

I had no idea who I was becoming yet likely until I got close to 30 or so. Then I began to understand who I was better. By age 30 I was a single father to a 4 year old son and I had married for the first time at age 26.

But, becoming a father was one of the best things that ever happened to me because I was caring about someone else and I could easily rise above my personal wants and needs to care for my son and luckily my parents at first helped me in this until I married eventually for the 2nd time.

So, surviving my 20s was very very hard until my son was born at age 26. Then somehow it wasn't hard at all staying alive and starting businesses to support myself and my son.

But, getting to that point (age 25) was almost impossible for me in trying to stay alive to see who I was going to become by age 30 as a single father and a business owner at that point in my life.

So, in the end survival is really about being kind enough to yourself so you actually will want to choose to be alive at all.

Survival

I was thinking today why Tibetan Buddhists and Tibetans in general have a philosophy of life where everything physical is both real and unreal simultaneously and where all dreams are both real and unreal simultaneously.

The logic of thinking like this is that one could more easily survive death or scary dreams or visions this way and also it would allow a person not to become overwhelmed completely with just too much happiness or joy in one's waking life or night time or day dreams.

So, one likely would not be as shocked when people died or when people left or be surprised when you have dreams of those who died who are coming back to make contact with you.

This philosophy makes sense from this level as long as it all is a balance. Because the danger of this philosophy would be if someone used it as an escape from dealing with either dreams or physical reality at all.

However, this philosophy in balance might cushion a person from too much overwhelm of death or joy or happiness in a way that was balanced in all ways.

So, this philosophy might contribute to a very long life and prosperity if it was used in balance in one's life.

IN a culture where people generally live above 8000 feet in elevation to about 15,000 feet in elevation you are going to naturally see a lot of death and mayhem and sickness because of quick exits from human bodies from the ongoing stress of high altitudes, brisk weather and trying to make a living at that altitude where only things like Barley or a few other things to eat might grow in a domain of Yaks and snow leopards and huge vultures. So, one can see the logic of this philosophy helping to keep the remaining people alive as long as possible.

Geshe Lobsang Gyatso said most people in Kham where he was from died by 50 to 60 years of age because of the harsh life and weather that high in the Himalayas (he was born in the early 1930s and passed away around 1999 I believe in California. And porters who carried everything where there were no roads at all in the Himalayas in 1985 and 1986 when I was there seldom lived past 40 to 50 if then. They were men at 15 and often married at that age when I was there then too.

Survival

I was thinking today what I tend to be proudest about in my life. I think I'm proudest of just having survived it all. 2nd I'm proud that all my kids are healthy and alive and doing whatever makes them happy. 3rd I'm grateful to be happily married and retired so most of the really serious stressors of life (except for health) are behind me.

So, what allows a person to survive to 65? I think for me it was a lot about genetics of my family. There always was this attitude among my father and grandfather exactly like, "I"m going to survive even if I'm the last person on earth and everyone else is dead." This is a very pioneer way of looking at things and "Yes" my family have been in the U.S. on my Dad's side since 1725 when they came over from Switzerland through Germany and England. So, there is a homespun backwoods "survival" attitude coming from my father's side for around 300 years now. So, I guess I have this too. When things got financially tough for my 2nd wife and I and our three kids (one from my first marriage and 2 from her first marriage in 1980 we used our savings and bought 2 1/2 acres at 4000 feet on remote land with a spring and built an A-Frame to survive that 10% unemployment recession then in the early 1980s by selling one of our vehicles (building supplies were much cheaper then relative to the average person's income).

So, I guess what allowed me to survive now 3 marriages, multiple recessions, 3 biological kids, 2 step kids, 2 God Daughters etc. etc. is never giving up no matter what happened. Oh, you might cry a night here or there as things got really rough. But always understanding there is another day and things always can change and get better no matter what is happening now.

For me, I think being able to say to God, "This is just too much for me to deal with God. Let me die in my sleep." And then by morning you did (die in your sleep) and you are reborn in God's image the next morning a completely different person ready to face another day! It isn't easy but it IS possible to survive to be 65 or 100 or 150 or 200 or more these days. Scientifically and medically it is possible if you want to. But, you have to be willing to do it.

Survival

There is more to life than just survival. If you look historically at people who viewed survival as the end all and be all of life you often see people who died from age 30 to age 50. So, though there are times all of us have to just find a way to survive and to take any job to have food to eat and a place to live that is not an ideal or desirable life for very long. There has to be quality to life to want to live it very long and finding what brings Quality to your life is the key to even wanting to live a long time or even become immortal as in "2045" of Ray Kurzweil's predictions. (Ray Kurzweil predicted the internet coming into being 20 years before it happened and Bill Gates thinks he is very technologically prescient).

Finding a reason and even fun in life helping yourself and others is what will give you true survival and bring you into true prosperity both internally and externally. When I started working after school and weekends I was 10 years old and started with a paper route. Though I had fun delivering the newspapers I did like to do it 7 days a week. (Especially when I had to get up about 3:30 AM or 4:00 AM on Sundays to deliver the Sunday paper to all my clients). But over time I realized I was being ripped off by the way things were set up within newspaper businesses then. If there was any loss(people who didn't pay me when I went to their door to collect at the end of every month) I took the hit not the newspaper. I had to pay for my newspapers whether my clients paid me or not. So every time a client said, "Come Back tomorrow" and wasn't there the next day or wouldn't answer their door I got ripped off not the newspaper. This was a very good lesson for me, "I learned that just because you do a good job doesn't mean that you will ever be rewarded for it by life." This was very important to learn as a 10 year old and showed me the full cruelty of life right then.

I don't think schools do anyone a favor by making everyone win. In real life there are those who survive and those who don't and it has more to do with who you know rather than what you know. For example, one of my sons best friends when to college for 5 years to become a Pixar type of Cartoonist because he is an incredible artist. He got his degree but couldn't get hired because he didn't know the right people. Then he worked in a comic book store. Then he got married and almost died from an allergic infection. But he survived his life because he married the right girl who was very successful and married him and stayed with him. So, in life you never know what is going to work and what won't until it does. All you can do is to keep trying things until something works or you die trying. That is what life is really like.

So, trying to give everyone awards in school and trying to make children think that everyone wins is a lie. And it is only going to give children psychological problems when the actually have to face the dog eat dog world of the real world out there where often nice people finish last or not at all. Unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to survive you might not. That is how difficult life really can be.

And the funny thing is that out of hundreds of decisions that you have to make ongoing to survive, even if you only make 1 or 2 decisions that actually work in your whole life, often that is enough to be happy. So remember that and keep making those decisions until you find the 1 or 2 that work so you can live to become maybe an immortal and maybe you will even want to write stuff like I do to encourage people to keep trying and to go on living to help others survive long enough until they figure it all out. Have a Great Day! Have a Wonderful Life!

Survival

I was dreaming last night and I was visited by a yoda like figure in my vision or dream. The being with much longer ears than Yoda said to me, "The human losses over the next 20 to 50 years could be not 25%, not 50% but 75%. You need to tell the humans this."

I'm not sure who was speaking to me. However, I have the ability to sense when something said is potentially true, so that is why I'm sharing this with you.

What I need to say to all of you is that if there is worldwide panic the losses could be as high as 75%. However, if enough people especially in the governments of earth are credible and trustworthy the losses of humanity will be as low as 25% of the human race.

I'm sharing this because staying calm and reasonable causes the most amount of human civilization to remain intact the next several thousand years. It will be the most bearable for your descendants to have as little disruption as possible on into the future. This allows kindness, efficiency and helpfulness to be the essence of civilization on into the future.