I don't know if any of you saw this, but last weekend I was in Granite Falls, WA, doing a wilderness survival training course.
It was the hardest thing I ever did. Tested me to the limit, even more than my rim-to-rim Grand Canyon day hike in 2021.
Nonstop rain, cold. Slept outside under a tarp. Had really poor equipment. I had to learn to compartmentalize my thoughts into half hour intervals just to get through the night. No sleep, by the way. I simply couldn't.
Frankly, I am still processing the whole thing in my head. Like, what did I do this for? What did I get out of it? Did it make me stronger, more resilient, expose me in any way? (The latter, YES.)
I always think of myself as a physically strong person. I wake up at 4am every day and workout out, then run outside, shirtless, regardless of temperature. (This morning was 25 degrees Farenheith.)
Nevertheless, I think I am still mentally weak. The course exposed me.
1 comment:
Mike, I don't think that your experience should make you conclude that you are mentally weak. My thought on hearing you were thinking of undertaking this was whether you were adequately prepared. Survival training is just that. Training is not throwing yourself into the toughest situations right off the bat.
In my experience, the process is methodical. Survival training involves acquiring survival skills over time. They don't come overnight or just by reading survival manuals, although this is necessary too.
I started learning this as a kid in scouting. You work up to the tougher challenges so as to avoid overexposing yourself unnecessarily, acquiring skills on the way as well as confidence in your ability to meet challenges.
Unexpected challenges do come up, like weather, and early on I caught pneumonia from an experience like yours that took three weeks in bed to recover from. Reflecting on it, this was not my fault at the time but more that of the leaders, who had all the needed equipment while their charges did not. When I got into a position of leadership later one, I realized they should have considered this and I better had do so going forward.
I also found out that no matter how much training one has as an amateur, it would be impossible to measure oneself against hardened professionals, like Navy seals for instance. I also had some friends that took this very seriously and regularly exposed themselves to extreme degrees even though they were not professionals.
My mentor at the time would seek out the toughest challenges, for example, but he had been a professional before retiring. He was a WWII master sergeant and martial arts expert in an art based on going for the throat. His teaching here was seek truth not comfort, which means getting used to be uncomfortable in the quest to plumb yourself: If you are comfortable, something has gone wrong. You aren't pushing yourself hard enough. But you don't want to break yourself either. The art is getting close to that line without crossing it.
There is a saying that success is the result of many failures, and that only failure being the failure to try, try again. I recall my riding instructor making me get back on my horse after a very serious fall. I did it even though it hurt. That was not my last fall and after that I always got up and got back on, even that time I fell off and the horse inadvertently stepped on me (still remember that one).
When I used to trade, I had a rule that if I had trouble sleeping at night to adjust my leverage in the AM . I did not see this as mental weakness but rather as the intuitive sentinel waving a red flag or at least a yellow one. Another mentor taught me that developing the sentinel is a key factor and that listening to the sentinel is not weakness but acuity.
But this is just considering the physical in training. There is also the mental. This is a whole other issue involving a whole different dimension of experience. This is what acquiring wisdom is concerned with. It also involves acquiring knowledge and skill but of another sort. Acquiring so-called spiritual discipline can be more challenging than so-called physical (although they cannot be definitively separated either since they are two sides of the same coin).
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