Survival 101

Many decades ago, when I was in high school, I had a calendar hanging in my room that was filled with brightly colored illustrations and short little quips and quotations. One I remember to this day was in the form of a question: Do you know the secret to a long life? The answer, cleverly printed upside down at the bottom of the calendar page was: Keep breathing!

But of course. That’s all there is to it! Not! Sure, breathing is essential for the functioning of this contraption we inhabit called a body (which Barbara Brown Taylor tags as “marvelous luggage” in her book An Altar in the World). But the continued process of taking in snatches of air and expelling its rapidly altered remnant, miraculous as that is, is only part of what keeps us alive.

I recently had the great honor of holding in my hands and beholding with my eyes a small memoir created by a veteran of the Viet Nam war. The pictures were unnerving, unsettling really, because they were actual photographs of a piece of dark history in my life I had previously only imagined. Other than a very faint memory of seeing my older cousin freshly discharged from his service in Viet Nam, sitting at our grandparents’ kitchen table on which his mangled and medically repaired left hand lay, my impressions of war were fueled by watching episodes of Mash and viewing several cinematic depictions such as Platoon and Saving Private Ryan. The images were one thing, the words quite another.

This veteran’s descriptions of what he experienced, how he felt, and who kept him going during his weeks of service were agonizing to read and impossible to forget. This young soldier was significantly wounded, nearly losing a leg and suffering shrapnel in his skull that spun his left eyeball in its socket. Survival dangled from a tenuous thread in that place and time. Perhaps an ingredient in being able to hang around on the planet for a while is avoiding spending time in a warzone.

The secret to a long life concisely is surviving minute by minute from one day to the next, whatever it takes. Our safety is never to be assumed. Neither is our health - physical, financial, emotional, mental - to be taken for granted. Sure, there are risks in getting out of bed and moving about each day among others of our kind. But there are also great rewards. So, look around your life for those who are acing Survival 101 and express your gratitude and learn from them. Keep breathing and take some small risks for some big reasons. Like love.