Microstory 310: Physical Safety

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Instinct

So far, I have been providing you with a list of everything necessary for an organism, particularly a human, to survive. You need air to breath, ground to stand on, water to drink, food to eat, and barriers between you and danger. You also need the supporting factors that make such things possible. This is the last of the survival necessities, and will be followed by a list of things required for what one might call a “full” life. That is, they will venture beyond basic survival, and start delving deeper into what a person needs in order to achieve true happiness. For now, I’m just going to talk about general physical safety. No one wants to live in a world of constant danger. But if you’re honest with yourself, you will realize that’s exactly where you are. You could slip in the shower, get run over by a car on the sidewalk, slip off a cliff, or just have a no-warning brain aneurysm. Danger abounds, as they say. Physical safety does not mean being completely free from anything that could do you harm. A boy in a bubble can still starve to death. The mark of a safe environment is not that there is no danger, but that there are ways of keeping the danger at bay, or of otherwise overcoming it. Airbags do not prevent vehicular collisions, but they make one easier to live through, should it occur. Before you can be a happy person, you need to understand where you’re living, and what precautions you need to take to make your life worthwhile. A lower-class person in a developing nation is not totally barred from happiness. They may just have more work. You can’t go through life worried about being hurt by it. Because even more important than physical safety itself, is knowing its limitations, and yours.

Intuition