I actually took some time to watch a video that I received in my E-mail box. I am not a person who watches things on the Internet. There are so many videos and audios that are recorded and sent around that I don't really have the time to spend watching and listening to things when I can read something in 60 seconds that takes 7 minutes for someone to say or show. So I am a reader, not a watcher/listener. But this time, I had five minutes and the title was catchy. "Three things I learned when I survived a crash landing." Five minutes to hear what this person had to say seemed to be a reasonable investment of intellectual time. Actually, the disappointing thing about the time invested is that there was nothing new in the five minute speech. I, and you, have heard the three things before and have read them numerous times on other PowerPoint shows that make the rounds of the world every day. There is, however one point that did cause me to relate to real experiences that I have had at various times in my life. Because there was commonality in the experiences with a variety of people, I came to see the light about the truth of the axiom that is the title of this post. The middle point of the speaker this time was simply, "I learned not to waste time harboring negative emotional energy in response to events that affect me." My mind was immediately pinging, dinging and ponging about like a major high scoring hit on a pinball machine. There was the Bible professor who had spend time in a German concentration camp, had escaped and was caught right at the border of Germany and Switzerland because the man who was escaping with him let out a French Exclamation when he was asked his name. Sorry guys, back to the gulag with you. Then there is the friend of mine who lost his family through his own fault because he could not control his drinking habit. He knows it's his fault. He knows that it is a disaster. Through honesty and spirituality, he has regained a part of the relationship that he had with the ex-wife and children. Finally, there is the young lady I know who was lost in the wild for a week or more and was near the last moments of her life when one of the search dogs came close to a tree near her to relieve himself. She sensed the presence and was able to move and the dog responded and she was found. All three of these people were the coolets, calmest, most collected beings that I have known. I did not know the second two as deeply as the first. But the ex-prisoner was my first experience in the company of someone who had survived a situation which appears to most of us to be larger and stronger than life itself. In the classroom, he was a marvel of clarity and of patience. On the tennis court, he was nigh on to unbeatable because he would commit an error, never miss a beat and come back and kill three shots in a row. While he was learning English [He was French, by the way] he never got nonplussed about himself or any other extraneous influences along the way. He would come back the next day, ready to attack the problems of the day before with a sense of determination and calm that I, personally, could never achieve.
People who survive something that normally claims human beings and destroys them learn instantaneously that survival is the fruit of positive focus and bears the same fruit after the incident. One time, one of us asked the ex-prisoner what he did about the friend who had erroneously committed the "fatal" language error. All he said was, "I spent the time going back to the gulag consoling him."
All of this came flooding back to me when the survivor of the crash landing on the Hudson River enumerated his three lessons. All three were in fact universal in nature, though particular to him. I had lived one of those vicariously through my friendship with three other human beings who had had similar experiences. There is a whole lot of truth to Philosophy after all.
