Surviving Our Lives

Our need to survive our lives starts on day 1 and never stops until the day of our death. In the Amazon rainforest, the resources for life are so abundant that 3 million species of organisms call this home. Competition for life is extraordinary. It’s an eat or be eaten world. “Boundaries” are really important; “I am me and you are you.” There is a yellow striped caterpillar that contains a toxin that will make most of its bigger predators quite ill. “Hey! I’m a yellow-striped caterpillar. Eat me at your peril!” There is another caterpillar that these same predators would find to be quite tasty, but it has a very similar yellow stripe. It survives by trickery and disguise. Defining one’s niche, one’s lane, is a very important part of survival. The countless ways organisms have adapted to this struggle (finding food and shelter; avoiding predators, infection, and disease) have been the inspiration behind many medications and continue to inspire new research. Now travel with me to the depths of the ocean, the Hadal zone, 20,000 – 36,000 feet below the surface. It is a world of darkness as light cannot penetrate this deeply into the water. It is a world of extreme pressure. It is a world of profound cold. All of this makes it a very difficult world for us to explore. But we are aware of 400 species that call the Hadal zone home. Most of these species are smaller than their cousins inhabiting friendlier, less deep parts of the ocean. But several species have adapted to the challenges by being much larger than their cousins. The keys to exploring and surviving these environments have been of great interest to NASA in trying to figure out the keys to exploring extreme environments in space where we might have the best chance of finding alien life (Jupiter’s moons).

Each of us is born into a unique environment, with its own challenges to adapt to. No one else in the universe born on your birthdate has faced the task of surviving your genes, your parents (unless you are a twin, triplet, etc.), your 4th grade teacher, your best friend’s betrayal in 6th grade, your physical gifts, your physical limitations, your native resilience, and your native susceptibilities. Each of us, while we are still breathing, have an amazing story to share about adaptation, about survival, about finding our way. All of our prized attributes as well as all of our bad habits came about as strategies for surviving our lives – gaining a bit more pleasure (food, safety, sex, etc.) and avoiding a bit more pain (physical and/or mental). At one time, my bad habit of putting myself down had a role in helping me survive the pain of rejection or threat of rejection. Mainly, at this point in my life, putting myself down isn’t too helpful in gaining pleasures or avoiding pain! But it continues due to habit. Still, it’s worth appreciating all these different parts of ourselves for what they are: survival strategies. And compassion arises in seeing how those around me are similarly molded by the pressures of their unique environments, for good and ill. Whether you love or hate Nancy Pelosi, Rand Paul, or Donald Trump, all of them could only be who they are, survivors of their genes, their parents, their communities that shaped them. And all of them have something valuable to offer based on their lived experience. This doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING they offer is going to be helpful. My poor self-esteem isn’t likely to help anybody, despite it stemming from lived experience. But some of my insights gleaned from living with poor self-esteem MIGHT be helpful. It pays to be discriminating in what we take from others. But more importantly here I want to look at what each of us has to offer others. While each of our lives is unique, there is also a great deal of overlap in the types of challenges many of us have faced. To use a cooking metaphor, we have been following a “recipe” of survival all of our lives, and the stew we have made from this is going to taste pretty good to some of those we know. There are lots of different ways of serving this up. You’ve already been doing this, presenting savory stews and partaking of others’ offerings. This is just about bringing some awareness to all this.

Our comparing brain puts us at a disadvantage here, tending to minimize our own contributions and over-value some of the contributions of others. A sports metaphor can help here. Increasingly, we are being made aware of sports records made by people from defined populations. For example, in the Paralympics, there is a record for the 100-meter dash for those with no legs who move with the aid of prosthetics and a separate record for those in wheelchairs. There is a 100-meter dash record for 15 years old’s and those over 100 years old. Many of these differences between ourselves and others are visible, and when this is the case, we tend to be more forgiving in the comparisons. We appreciate the 100-year-old runner simply making it to the finish line, even if the 26.34 seconds record is well off Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds world record. We can appreciate here that “it’s not a level playing field.” But I wonder if all of our comparisons need to be adjusted for all the invisible advantages and disadvantages between people. I’m thinking that for all of us, we bring to our own 100-meter dash, invisible and visible gifts and obstacles such that for some of us it is like we are running our dash up a steep sand-dune, sinking into the sand and finding that every 6 inch step up involves sliding back down half the distance and for others of us it is like we are funning down hill with a wind at our back. But we tend to ignore the lack of the level playing field and simply compare ourselves to Usain Bolt or someone prettier or more talented or richer or more popular or (insert anything desirable to ourselves here) and find in the comparison how we suck! But truth be told, there is no one born on July 17th (my birthdate), to my parents, blessed by Miss Howard (my 4th grade teacher), dumped by Hank and Marty (6th grade friends), who is more handsome, well-liked, generous, or “successful.” Mind-you, there is no one uglier, disdained, selfish, and “unsuccessful”, either. The twin sides of uniqueness. But being in the tribe of low self-esteem, I bring much more habitual awareness to the negative list and not nearly enough appreciation to the positive list.