Dodging And Withstanding: Two Essential Virtues For The Relationship With Others

Knowing how to draw on boxing and animal defence strategies

When we interact with others, we are presented with experiences that could be placed into three categories: positive, neutral or negative.

Often we come out of a negative experience affected by a negative experience and invigorated by a positive one.

A problem can arise when we repeatedly encounter harmful people because it drains our energy. One can learn to protect oneself from them like a boxer, either by taking the punches if they have natural resilience or dodging the punches if they are rather agile. It is in the same way that prey in the wild learn to defend themselves from predators.

Faced with a lion or hyenas, elephants and gazelles are potential prey, yet they have deployed different survival techniques. One is to avoid confrontation through agility and speed, the other is to face them with the help of their thick skin and tusks.

For this reason, each person has a totem animal that symbolizes the mixture of these two characteristics of dodging and resilience. Of course, other people will gladly define themselves more as predators, so there is an attack dimension for them. There are different reasons for an attack and types of attackers: some attack as a defense strategy while others find themselves filling the role of a scavenger or a predator within their machinations.

A scavenger attacks dead prey while a predator attacks live prey. In nature there is no fundamental difference between these two behaviours: a predator can behave like a scavenger and vice versa. It is rather a spectrum, some animals will have a scavenging tendency while others will be more predatory. This does not change the defence strategies that we must employ in a hostile environment: knowing how to dodge or withstand an attack.

Herbivores also use group strategies to protect themselves from predator attacks. One is to impress and deter. It is more difficult for a lion to attack a herd of buffaloes than an isolated buffalo. The other is to reduce the probability of being attacked: a prey group of 30 animals has mathematically ten times more chance of being attacked than one in a herd of 300 animals. This second category is to be proscribed from the brain, it is the undesirable attitude of the perfect victim; this second way of thinking explains the “witness effect” or “spectator effect”, i.e. the inaction of witnesses to an attack in a public place simply because there are other witnesses. Don’t be a sheep, but rather a buffalo or elephants who can help your fellow human beings in times of need!

So, inspire us with animals: find one or more allies to form a homogenous group ready to help each other in all kinds of challenges.

Life can be like a savannah. We sometimes move forward without knowing where we are going. We can make threatening encounters. However, if you find a group of reliable friends, you can go further and face the greatest perils and accomplish incredible projects.