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Attitude and Awareness: Honing The Survival Edge

Rarely does everything go exactly the way we want it to in life: business, diving and especially take-out food. That's okay, because the serendipitous events of the unexpected can sometimes be a great learning experience. Or they can be yet another episode in natural selection. Anticipation is, of course, a first line of awareness that conditions the diver to expect things to go wrong and be constantly adjusting a mental to-do list when circumstances find him "circling the drain" in a bad situation. Mental preparation and skills conditioning are the first elements of survival. But it helps to have the extra edge of knowing you can beat the situation simply based on will and attitude. Remarkably, the only difference between some survivors and those who perished was the attitude of each individual. In diving, preparation for contingencies can ease your  eventual encounter with them. But almost as important is developing an "attitude" of confidence that allows you the edge in dealing with stressful and dangerous scenarios. My first dive was in the late 1950's and since then I've managed to step into the world of contingencies with both feet firmly planted on more than few occasions. Several brushes with mortality were thwarted, perhaps  simply by refusing to accept that my number was up. And although scared, I was still running through the checklist of options instead of giving up. Consider this quotation from How to Survive on Land and Sea originally published in a U.S. Navy publication in 1943: Life's battles do not always go To the stronger or faster man, But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can. There are accounts of WWII seamen who managed to escape death in sunken convoy vessels, only to lose hope in lifeboats and simply decide to die. Their shipmates who marshaled courage to... More »