The survival I came to know on this trip was about something completely different. It was, above all, about letting yourself be affected by the changing world around you. Not just riding it out, but adapting, molting. Not succumbing to the luxury of despair, but keeping a foothold in possibility. Not blocking the world out, but letting it in.

The movies condition us to imagine survival as a response to a singular, calamitous event: a pandemic virus, a zombie invasion, a plane crash, aliens, government collapse. But it’s more realistic to imagine that we are already living in the midst of a slowly unfurling cataclysm whose effects we encounter in succession, like the waves of an ocean.... See more