What is Survival?

It is said that given a long enough time frame, nobody survives.  Or as one t-shirt quote put it, “Don’t take life so seriously no one survives anyway.”

Survival is defined by Wikipedia as “The act of surviving, to stay living.”  Dictionary.com says that survival is ” The act or fact of surviving, especially under adverse or unusual circumstances.”

The first known use of the word survival dates back to the year 1598 and is a conjunction of two words, survive + all = Survival!

Probably the reason that it appeared so late in the development of the English language is that up to that time it was just called living!

You just went as long as you could and then you died.  We do the same thing today.  But, every day life was much harder for them than it is for us and often death was a release from a life of drudgery.

We have much more leisure time available to us and contemplating our own mortality is not something we enjoy.

When a life-threatening situation occurs to us, we want to do everything we can to make it back to our life and loved ones.

However, many of our ancestors possessed skills for everyday living that have been lost by us two or three generations ago in the developed world.  These were the survival skills that enabled them to live in a much more dangerous and unpredictable world.

Today, there is a growing movement to rediscover and practice those skills using modern as well as ancient methods to stay alive in multiple environments and scenarios.  Many people realize that a world of increasing complexity such as ours is also a world of increasing fragility.

Most of our fruit, vegetables, meat and other goods come from thousands of miles from our homes.  Even a minor disruption such as a snow storm can empty store shelves of batteries and other basics in short order.

Having survival skills gives a person a sense of security much like the insurance policy that covers their home, business or vehicle.

So what are survival skills?  According to Wikipedia, “Survival skills are techniques that a person may use in order to sustain life in any type of natural environment. These techniques are meant to provide basic necessities for human life which include water, food, and shelter.

The skills also support proper knowledge and interactions with animals and plants to promote the sustaining of life over a period of time. Survival skills are often basic ideas and abilities that ancients invented and used themselves for thousands of years.

Outdoor activities such as hiking, backpacking, horseback riding, fishing, and hunting all require basic wilderness survival skills, especially in handling emergency situations”.

Having described what physical survival is, let us turn our minds to spiritual survival.  Maybe you have heard the acronym:

Basic

Instructions

Before

Leaving

Earth

Eternity is a very long time.

While you are preparing yourself to “Survive All”, make sure that when this life is over you are prepared to survive what’s next.

We have heard that there are only two certain things in life, death and taxes.  Well, there are some who have evaded the authorities and skipped out on the taxes part.

However, there are still two certain things! Death and Judgement!  We have an appointment with these two and we will not be able to skip either one.

Make your preparations for eternity and develop the spiritual survival skills so that neither death nor judgement can take away eternal life!

Now that’s survival!