In my thirties I lived for a few years on my sail boat named Kentra. Life on the sea taught me some things about survival and surrender.

The following is a passage from the book "Deep Survival", who lives, who dies and why, by Laurence Gonzales.

He writes about a group of people whose sailboat sank, they are now stuck on a rubber dingy in the open sea without food or water.
    - Joanna

Passage from "Deep Survival" by Laurence Gonzales.

Survival means accepting reality, and accepting reality takes a hard heart. But it is a strange kind of coldness for it has empathy at its center. Survivors discover a spiritual relationship to the world. They often have a talisman to connect them with it, a sort of life line from inner to outer reality.

Debbie Kiley found her spiritual side and her talisman in the memory of an old sailor who had told her that "if a sailor wearing a black pearl was ever lost at sea, he could trade it to Poseidon for his life". After hearing that she had bought a black pearl earing, which she still wore. "Now I reached up and touched the earing, I fingered the pearl". She took it off and threw it into the sea. When Brad asked what she was doing, she said, "Nothing". She recognized, too, her need for privacy: to keep certain things to yourself and maintain that consolidated identity, that sacred inner core of selfhood.

Orwell's novel 1984 is in part about how Winston Smith gradually looses that sacred core. In group survival we all need privacy. The immune system itself tells us what is us and what is the rest of the world, as do emotions. Privacy is essential to life. Life itself can be seen as arising by a self organizing force that gathers certain materials, hoards and tends them, and protects them from becoming part of the rest of the world, even when delicately interacting with, finding a place with, taking from and giving to the world. Privacy is life but so is community. It's another balancing act, to have boundaries and not be completely alone.

At times when nature is trying to reclaim the materials of life, to turn you into the raw stuff of the world for its eternal tinkering, you have to cling to what is yours and yours alone, even while committing to another.. That may be the meaning of a talisman: This is me, this is my stuff. Yossi Ginsburg clung to a little book that his uncle had given him. Steve Callahan clung to his boy scout knife. Kiley clung to her black pearl and committed it to Poseidon. She made a pact between her and the sea. Although Kiley was beginning to find a calm within herself, she still had at best a tenuous hold on it, and at times, found herself asking herself one of the deadliest questions of all "Why this, why now, why me?"

Gratitude, humility, wonder, imagination and cold logical determination: those are the survivors tools of mind.