What do Navy Seals teach us about Life

We have a say in my country that the two worst ways to die are either drowning or burning.

The Navy Seals undergo harsh trainings before they are allowed to be sent on complex missions. One of the most difficult exercises they undergo, referred to as Drown Proofing, consists of tying the seals feet, tying their hands behind their backs, then throwing them into a 2.5 meter deep pool for 5 minutes to float, swim to the shallow end of the pool, turn around without touching the bottom, swim back to the deep end, and retrieve an object from the bottom of the pool. All with their feet and hands tied.

You would imagine that swimming and diving under water while your hands and feet are tied is something one can do, with little effort, and some basic physical fitness, but it is not. And the trickiest part of this training is “floating”. This means without moving your legs and arms, you need to be still in the water without drowning.

Many of the Navy Seals fail at Drown Proofing. As soon as they jump into the water, the normal reaction of the Navy Seal is to panic, so they start exerting excess of physical effort and strength to accomplish the mission. After a minute or two, they become short of breath and are ordered to be lifted out. Some lose consciousness and are resuscitated. There were even some death cases during Drown Proofing.

So what do we learn from Down Proofing.

By contemplating the Seals in the water for few minutes, you will immediately understand that the more they are restless and the more they struggle to keep their head above water, the more they will fail. Even worse, if they try to float by moving their tied legs, they will sink. After few minutes of struggling to float, the Seals begin to panic. The more they panicked the more oxygen they burned, the more tired they became, and the more likely they were to lose consciousness. You come to realize that their survival extinct turns their efforts against them. The more they desire to breathe, the less they were able to breathe.

There are means to pass and survive the Drown Proofing test. And this method is paradoxal. How do you float when your legs and arms are tied inside water? You don’t. You let yourself sink to the bottom of the pool, and from there you will lightly push yourself off the pool floor and let your momentum carry you back to the surface. Once at the surface, you take a deep breath and repeat the process again.

So what does all that mean?

We treat life, and the daily events, as if they were all a pile of emergencies. We struggle to get out of trouble every time we face challenges. We work ourselves out and burn energy to make sure we are earning the lifestyle we deserve. We work hard to save money, believing that if we work twice we will produce twice the results. That if we invest big effort into our relationshups we will harvest signiifcant results. We go through life believing that the relationship between effort and reward is one-to-one.

Winston Churchill once said: if you are going through hell, keep going. The idea here is to learn to let go during hardship. To let it pass. To learn to do nothing sometimes. Not to react. Not to have an opinion and a plan to everything. To accept. To let yourself sink and then use the steady rock bottom to push yourself up again.

My son comes to me some times and tells me he is bored. I always answer him: it is totally okay to be bored. Just accept it and live with it. Otherwise how would you know when you are having fun. When you are actually living.