"Deep Survival - Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why"

This book by Laurence Gonzales explores why some individuals survive accidents or catastrophic events against all odds while others die - sometimes because they made a wrong choice.

Although I struggled through Part One -- except for the anecdotal stories, I found wisdom in "The Rules of Life" that the author and his eldest daughter came up with when she was only six years old:

Rule 1: "Be here now." The author sees this one as a good survival rule because paying attention to the here and now also involves keeping an up-to-date mental model which can make a huge difference in whether one survives or not.

Rule 2: "Everything takes eight times as long as it's supposed to." In survival terms this can mean being adaptable and not getting caught up in sticking with a plan that might not make sense in the current situation.

At the top of page 88 in Chapter Six, Gonzales discusses how elite performers train hard so when novices go into the wilderness, they need to train hard,too. Novices will face the same challenges experts do but nature won't adjust to their level of skill -- or lack of skill.

Chapter Eight is entitled "Danger Zones" and makes the case for consulting locals when you're in new territory before venturing into a situation that might look innocuous but could actually have some elements of danger that a local might forewarn you about.

Part Two is titled "Survival" and this is where the book really became more engrossing for me because it gives mostly examples of real life situations and why some individuals survived and others did not. There is a paragraph here that really spoke to me because this book is not just about surviving major events but it also offers good advice for living and surviving life -- deaths, divorce, etc.

On page 157, the author writes, "Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life. People know that instinctively. A man leaves a perfectly good family for a woman half his age and makes a mess of it, and people say, he got off the path, he lost his way. If he doesn't get back on, he'll lose the self,too. A corporation can do the same thing."

Gonzales then goes on to talk about five general stages in the process that a person goes through when lost:

Stage 1) Deny you're disoriented and press on with growing urgency trying to make your mental map fit what you're actually seeing.

Stage 2) Next you realize you're really lost so the urgency blossoms into a full-scale survival emergency. "Clear thought becomes impossible and action becomes frantic, unproductive, even dangerous."

Stage 3) This is usually after an injury or exhaustion, "you expend the chemicals of emotion and form a strategy for finding some place that matches the mental map. (It is a misguided strategy, for there is no such place now. You are lost.)"

Stage 4) "....you deteriorate both rationally and emotionally, as the strategy fails to resolve the conflict."

Stage 5) "...you run out of options and energy, you must become resigned to your plight. Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are. You must become Robinson Crusoe or you will die. To survive, you must find yourself. Then it won't matter where you are."

At the bottom of page 162 the author talks about the Zen concept of the beginner's mind, "the mind that remains open and ready despite years of training. 'In the beginner's mind there are many possibilies,' said Zen master Shunryu Suzuki. 'In the expert's mind there are few.'" This might explain why some novices survive and some skilled adventurers do not!

Laurence Gonzales is himself a "veteran adventurer" and shares from his and his family's own personal experiences of survival. For more, go to www.deepsurvival.com.

pazt