You Survived. What Are You Going to Do With the Life You Got Back? 

There are seasons when just surviving is exactly what life asks of us.

• You put your head down and embrace the suck
• You do the work.
• You take care of the people who need you.
• You answer all the damn emails.
• You pay the bills. Repair the roof. Do the mountains of laundry.
• You schedule the appointments, coordinate the family schedule. Navigate the carpool lines.
• You endure the losses and take the occasional “L” on the chin.

And, if you’re lucky, you make it to see another glorious…tomorrow.

There’s nothing insignificant about these small victories. Survival can be sacred. The problem begins when tomorrow finally arrives… and we don’t even notice.

That idea surfaced in a recent conversation I had with Paul Prien, author of Survive. Become. Return.

Paul uses a phrase I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:

“Surviving Survival.“

At first it sounds kind of redundant. Then you think about it for a few days and it starts explaining an enormous amount of adult life.

The Thing That Saved You Can Become the Thing That Traps You

During times of crisis, we humans have gotten really good at adapting.

• We become hyper-efficient. Super useful. Uber dependable.
• We compartmentalize ( a lot)
• We learn to function at a pretty high level even when we’re tired, beat down and facing enormous mountains to climb.
• We solve the next problem before allowing ourselves time to absorb the last one.

Sometimes those adaptations are exactly what allow us to keep on truckin’. But survival strategies have a strange quality. They don’t just automatically disappear when the emergency is over.

The storm passes – But our nervous system doesn’t get the memo.

Paul described survival as something that was never supposed to become our permanent operating system. Survival is supposed to build a floor beneath us so that when life knocks us down, we don’t fall quite so deep into the abyss.

Survival isn’t meant to become the ceiling above us and still many of us eventually find ourselves living exactly that way.

• “Successful”
• “Productive”
• “Admired”
• “Checking all the right boxes”

And privately, in the quiet moments, asking ourselves:

Did I actually choose this life?

Paul described the feeling in a beautiful way. You wake up. The alarm goes off. And instead of feeling curious about the day, you already know exactly what to expect.

• The same obstacles.
• The same pile of emails.
• The same spreadsheets to process.

Another productive day. Another day that looks pretty much exactly like yesterday.

Nothing’s necessarily wrong. (That’s what makes this so difficult to recognize).

You may have accomplished everything life asked of you.

• Built the career.
• Raised the family.
• Been a responsible, upstanding member of society.
• Been the person everyone could count on.

But, you still feel a tension between the life you have and the life somewhere inside you that hasn’t been lived yet.

We Bury Dreams Under Very Responsible Things

One of my favorite moments in my conversation with Paul came when we talked about dreams. Paul had wanted to write a book for decades but life had other plans.

• Career
• Caregiving.
• Responsibility.

He spent years doing things he was good at, including work that wasn’t necessarily what he felt called to do but paid the bills. Sound familiar?

The dream didn’t disappear. It just got buried beneath the pile of urgent responsibilities. I think a lot of us understand that.

Dreams are rarely buried beneath obvious villains. They’re buried under totally respectable things.

• Meetings. Lots and lots of … meetings.
• Homework.
• Mortgages.
• Kids travel sports.
• Doctor’s appointments. Lots and lots of… doctor’s appointments.
• Quarterly earnings reports and KPI dashboards.
• Caring for aging parents.
• Doing what life is asking of us that day, week, year or decade.

And sometimes that’s exactly what we should be doing. Sometimes, we really don’t have another option, but Paul made an important distinction.

You don’t have to abandon the dream just because you can’t live it fully today.

Give your dream just five minutes:

• Write for five minutes.
• Paint for five minutes.
• Play that instrument (even if you sound terrible)
• Research the idea.
• Imagine the possibility.
• Preserve a little piece of the person you are still becoming.

Paul suggested that five minutes today has a way of becoming more over time. Not because of magic. It’s more about momentum.

Dreams don’t always need a wide open highway. Sometimes they just need a little room to breath.

Caregiving and the Sacred Detour

Paul’s story became especially powerful when we talked about his wife and her battle with Alzheimer’s disease. For years, life asked something very specific of him.

• Care for her.
• Be present.
• Help make an impossible journey a little easier.

He described that season not with resentment, but as something he believed he had been placed on Earth to do. A purpose – even when, at times, his wife no longer knew who he was.

But underneath that moment was something really touching.

Paul understood that her suffering wasn’t a distraction preventing him from getting to his “real life.” At that particular moment in his journey, caring for her was his life.

The idea of surviving survival shouldn’t become an excuse to resent your responsibility. There are seasons when life genuinely asks us to set ourselves to the side.

Those seasons aren’t mistakes. They’re a big part of being human.

But even “sacred detours” on the road of life eventually come to the end of the line. When they do, we face another important challenge…

We have to stop living as though the old emergency still exists.

Paul described the freedom to finally write his book or have conversations like the one we had that day as almost a reward for having faithfully lived the previous chapter.

Not replacing it with a new chapter. Following it up by writing the next.

What Is This Season Asking of Me?

This may be the question from our conversation I find myself carrying the most:

What is this season of life asking of me?

Not: What was I supposed to become by this age?

Not: What did my parents expect?

Not: What title have I spent thirty years defending?

What is life asking of me right now?

That question hits me personally because so much of my own identity has been wrapped up in playing roles.

• CEO
• Husband
• Father

Those aren’t bad identities. I love’em. But none of them remain static forever.

• My children need different things from me now than they did when they were younger.
• My marriage changes as Jessica and I change.
• Even leadership evolves. My responsibilities to the company I serve have evolved substantially over 10 years.

The danger zone appears when I cling hard to an old version of myself just because it once gave my life meaning.

That’s one of the reasons Paul’s references to Buddhism resonated so much with me. One of Buddhism’s fundamental observations is that suffering emerges from attachment—our insistence that things remain exactly as they are in a world where everything is constantly changing.

• Roles change.
• Our bodies change.
• Family dynamics change.
• Careers change.
• Relationships change.

We suffer when we demand permanence from these things that were never designed to last forever.

Perhaps surviving survival requires loosening our grip on identities that once served us – Not rejecting them but letting go of our demands that they stay unchanged forever.

Planting Seeds for Someone You Haven’t Met Yet

Paul calls another part of his philosophy Service to Your Future Self.

What a cool concept. Ten years from now, there’s a version of you who will inherit what you’re doing today.

• Your habits.
• Your choices.
• Your courage.
• Your avoidance.
• Your savings.
• Your friendships.
• The apology you still haven’t made.
• The five minutes you finally gave to the dream.

What seeds are we planting today for our future? And perhaps more importantly:

What seeds are we watering?

• Fear?
• Resentment?
• Possibility?
• Curiosity?
• Self-pity?

The future is almost never created by making one heroic decision. No. It’s built by planting one tiny seed at a time and watering the right ones. That idea makes “service to your future self” much less dramatic than it actually sounds.

Maybe today’s act of service to your future self is taking a walk or:

• Calling your Mom.
• Writing one page of your book.
• Turning off the damn phone.
• Finally making the appointment.
• Leaving a job.
• Staying in a marriage and working harder at it.
• Ending a relationship that no longer serves you.

Your future self is being built today. One little seed at a time.

Perfection Is a Direction

Toward the end of our conversation, Paul introduced another idea he’s exploring: The pursuit of perfection.

I instinctively tense up when I hear the word perfection. For many people (me included), perfectionism isn’t inspirational. It’s absolutely exhausting. But Paul means something completely different. He’s not talking about being flawless. He’s talking about direction. He said something close to:

Practice makes…better.

That reminded me of my good friend, Paul Osting who I coached baseball with years ago and was a guest on Season 1. Paul used to tell our players:

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.

That hits home… my daughter, Peyton, touched on a similar idea in a school commencement speech she once gave.

Notice what both ideas have in common. Neither require arrival at perfect. That’s the trap hidden inside perfection. When perfection becomes the destination, it can easily become procrastination wearing expensive designer clothes.

• You wait until you’re ready.
• You wait until the manuscript is perfect.
• You wait until the business plan is polished.
• You wait until you’re in fightin’ shape.
• You wait until the timing is just right.

And … you never begin. But when perfection is direction… everything changes.

You don’t need to arrive. You just need to keep moving forward.

The Clearing Sky

There are seasons when survival is what life asks of us.

Honor them.

Care for the person.

Take the job.

Do the work.

Make the sacrifices.

Just get through the night.

But eventually…

look up.

Has the storm passed?

Are you still carrying an umbrella beneath a clear blue sky?

Maybe the question isn’t whether or not you survived.

Maybe the question now is:

What are you going to do with the life survival gave back to you?

So imagine yourself ten years from today.

Don’t picture the résumé.

Don’t picture the bank account.

Picture the person.

How do they feel?

Who do they love?

What weight have they stopped carrying?

What do they wish you had started sooner?

Then ask:

What can I do today in service to that person?

One choice.

One habit.

One conversation.

One small act of courage.

Survival may get us through the storm but eventually, life asks us what we want to do with the clearing blue sky.