Survival Skills, Essay Example

Survival Skills: Three Kinds of Discipline

For a student, the most obvious place to look for something to classify is in the unique life of the campus, classroom, and dorm-room. But this paper’s instructions state to “classify survival skills that people need to get through life.” I looked around and came up with three plausible categories that will help me in the future as both a student and non-student. My classification is the three kinds of discipline people employ to survive in the modern world. I illustrate their differences by restricting the discussion to the kinds of discipline employed by those who want to become physically fit, or want to keep the fitness they already have.

The first kind of person practicing physical fitness is the kind who naturally enjoys the process itself, not just the outcome. I will call them the naturally fit. They walk a lot, whenever they can. “I have the European urge to use my feet whenever a drive can be dispensed with,” wrote Humbert Humbert in Lolita. For such people, fitness is just the natural outcome of their lifestyle. If they attend a gym, they are likely to walk to it on the way to or from their job or their campus because they live within walking distance of most of the important functions in their lives. But they are unlikely to exercise strenuously every day. Instead, they simply follow their inspiration to do that, whenever it strikes. Suddenly they have a vision of themselves working out, or hiking, or jogging — whatever. That’s all it takes because they actually look forward to it. This fortunate kind of person actually does not employ discipline in the usual sense of the word, except to intelligently resist the temptations of the other two, discussed briefly below.

The second kind of person is what I call the punitively fit. Exercise is strictly an exercise in discipline alone. I can punish myself more than you can punish yourself is the implied boast these people live to make. An example would be the man I read about a few years ago who found himself unable to ever skip his morning jog. After he broke his ankle, he rigged up a special sort of spring-loaded cast that would enable him to jog with acceptable pain. People known as gym rats might be another example. Basically their lives revolve around their workouts and eventually their workouts come to define them. To skip a workout becomes unthinkable. And so does less than perfect fitness, as defined by exercise devices and the metrics they display.

The third type is what I call the apparently fit. These people remind me of a cigarette smoker who is always in the process of quitting but never quiet manages it. (I once saw a woman in workout clothes take a couple of quick, last deep drags on a cigarette before heading to her strip-mall fitness center.)  Many of the apparently fit join commercial gyms and take yoga classes. They use their cars to get there, hassling with parking and traffic. They do not eat particularly healthy food — that’s what the exercise is for. Eventually if not sooner, the stress and bother of it all gets to the apparently fit, and they quit attending — which is exactly the outcome commercial gyms depend on. As for exercising on their own in a park or just walking to the store more often, the one doesn’t provide a group to be a part of, and the other requires too much time.

So there is natural discipline, the kind that is not punitive but rather is just the product of a particular kind of person and their lifestyle. They genuinely enjoy the process, which is not something they can quit. Then there is the punitive kind without which the goal being sought would simply be pointless. Pain is the point. And then there is the kind that does not exist in any real way, except to fool those who practice it. It is pretty clear that these three kinds of discipline can be applied to all kinds of activities in life. To survive, different kinds of people need them.