For one thing, the people who adopt this approach tend to be cautious. It is a nice idea in theory, but it tends not to work out in practice. There is another saying: “Pick your battles.” The concept here is that you conserve your strength, plan your strategy, and then strike when you are positioned to win. In other words, losses in the struggle between life and death can have real and permanent consequences. Being a loser often brings real impairments. But often it is simply false: you may come away intimidated or crippled. There is a saying: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” The idea seems to be that losing a fight tends to make a person faster, more powerful, more motivated, or otherwise better prepared to win next time. This post offers a few observations about those confrontations. Our experience of this conflict between life and death comes down to countless day-to-day confrontations among people, animals, other living things, and inanimate forces and objects. It is simply convenient to speak as though they had personalities and objectives of their own.)
(Of course, the intention here is not that life and death are gods or other beings, nor do they necessarily reflect the workings of any divinity or supernatural force. An earlier post in this blog suggests that we can talk about life and death as large abstractions but for personal purposes, one tends to experience life and death, not as gigantic monoliths staring at each other across a no-man’s-land, but rather as wrestlers or sporting teams, forever grappling and struggling for a slightly stronger hold or another inch of turf.
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