More than Just Surviving
March 20, 2020 | By Sharmaine Koh, SM ‘22. Sharmaine is majoring in History.
We can escape this languishing condition of survival because we are able to eradicate the forces of fear that drive and maintain the survival instinct. Perfect love casts out all fear.
By the time Spring Break came around, the general mood that seemed to hover oppressively over the campus was exhaustion. We all looked forward to the space that those two-weeks afforded us to breathe and gather our bearings before plunging back into the relentless rhythm of academic life. All around, people were telling me to hang in there. I was telling people to hang in there. Most times it felt like I was getting trussed about in the sea, and the only thing I was hanging on to was a rotten plank. The shore was just a hundred feet away, tantalizingly close, frustratingly far.
These days, the global pandemic might make our academic woes seem laughably trivial. Many of us would give anything to trade the fears and stresses of disruption, infection, social isolation, loss of support and certainty — for the simpler pressures of academic labour. But in our vigilant handwashing, Zoomer-U-a-meme-ing, miserable self-quarantining, there is that same sense of struggle against forces quite beyond our control. I’m still hanging on to that rotten plank. The waves just seem to be rougher. I focus on just staying afloat. I know that this is all many of my peers can focus on doing now. Without the support structures of campus and community, it’s a terrifying time to be alive, and just surviving — just getting by — is a condition that is as inescapable as it is stifling. These days, all we do is survive. It’s hard enough to think about living well, let alone thriving.
What’s the distinction? Perhaps survival might be best understood as continuing to exist —staying alive — in spite of an environment of stress and danger. It makes no inroads beyond the bare minimum. It’s you hanging on to a rotten plank in the middle of a rough ocean, just afloat. Flourishing and thriving, in contrast, points to an “optimal range of human functioning”, full of goodness, creativity, growth, resilience. The sense of human flourishing that Aristotle gestured toward. It’s getting on that plank and surfing, Moana-style, granted that’s a ridiculously tall order in the face of the most fearsome waves.
Exhaustion is symptomatic of the survivalist condition. We are constantly at war against the conditions, whether we choose fight or flight. In the face of stress and danger much of what motivates us is fear, and it is all-consuming. Whether it is fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of uncertainty, fear of loss, fear of radical loneliness, a fear that other people in our lives might get hurt … fear is an exhausting condition to bear. It tires us out, eats us hollow, and in the process leaves little room for love. We survive, but we are in the true sense of the word, barely alive. We might think that our survival mindset is temporary: we only need to ride out the crisis. We find coping mechanisms. We try to recover normalcy in our daily routines. But the desperate conditions of the coronavirus crisis, I think, is less a rupture in our way of life and more a revelation of a condition we’ve long found ourselves in.
And yet can we be blamed? For many of our brothers and sisters whose lived realities are far from privileged, it appears as if there is no choice between these two states of being. Insofar as the survivalist condition propagates endless fear that in turn ensures an endless state of exhaustion, flourishing remains a pipe dream. In a world that has fallen far from perfection, we cannot change the conditions of stress and danger that we are subject to. Human suffering manifests itself on a spectrum of problem sets to pandemics, and everything else in between. Might it be only human to struggle for our existence, driven by fear of absolute and utter annihilation by the crushing forces that surround us on a daily basis?
But I know that I am fortunate, as are my Christian brothers and sisters. We can escape this languishing condition of survival because we are able to eradicate the forces of fear that drive and maintain the survival instinct. Perfect love casts out all fear. One need only count the number of times the Bible invokes: “Do not be afraid!” Psalm 23:4 defeats the notion that survival is all that is possible in the face of utter annihilation: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me”. What beauty lies in this radical freedom in the face of terror!
Some say that religion is a coping mechanism. After all, “I’m still alive but I’m barely breathing / Just prayin’ to a God that I don’t believe in”, is a sentiment The Script famously sang. Maybe — maybe it’s another one of those methods of survival, a distraction conjured by the desperate to convince themselves that they aren’t alone in a world set adrift.
But if coping means only surviving, then one need only look at the fruits of faith to see that believing in God enables more than just coping. In the direst situations, allowing God into the picture allows us to go beyond our fears and our survival instincts. We go beyond — we imagine not just escaping death but triumphing over it. There is breathing space to not just survive, but flourish, freed from our human limitations because we are enabled by God, who looks upon our smallness and out of overflowing love, and unfailingly comes to our help. Deuteronomy 31:6 promises that faith in God’s existence guarantees that we never have to face the prospect of abandonment and lonely struggle: “for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave or forsake you”.
This, I think, this same love and solidarity that God demonstrates to His children, is what will move us from merely staying alive to fully and richly flourishing. We need remember that access to a state of flourishing remains distinctly unequal in our world today, as a result of myriad social, political, and economic conditions. Therein lies the impetus to reach out to each other in love, particularly in this time of gripping fear, and beyond this time of Lent. Not everyone has or wants to have a helper in God — realities that we must respect. Then it is all the more a Christian duty, having been freed from fear and conditions of mere survival by divine love, to reach out and enable fellow human beings, Christian or not, do more than just survive, so that at least others might have a helper in us. We are, after all, his body. So in the midst of the stormy seas, take courage in the Lord and keep your head above water. Freed from the oppressive fear, paddle your way over to your neighbours. Reach out, lash together your wooden planks. Stronger, braver, and not alone, we’ll all make it to shore, and do much more than just survive.