Okay, maybe one more anecdote might make some sense here...

I left elk camp well prepared. I had all the right gear, and was ready for anything. Anything is what happened, and 10 miles from camp at 3:00pm on a snowy November day, I broke my leg. Thus disabled for the night, I got my leg splinted okay. I managed to pitch my shelter in a suitable windbreak where an abundance of twigs and branches quickly became a cookfire for some water and soupfixins. Laying at the mouth of my tent, I had little else to do but be bothered by the pain in my leg. I took my meds and pulled out my harmonica and proceeded to learn how to play yet another tune (Emmylou Harris' "Away beyond the Blue"). An hour later, I was able to fall asleep after putting a few more branches into the fire. The next morning, I awoke, turned my radio back on, and within about an hour heard my hunting buddy calling for me on it.

I was lucky in a lot of ways. The harmonica did not take the pain away, but it got my mind off the pain and thinking about something other than my sad state. I stayed calm while I was dealing with my survival issues, and I remained calm after there was nothing else left to do for the night thanks to the harmonica. I am sure if I had playing cards, it would've been about as distracting, although there really wasn't enough light to play by, and I didn't want to overuse my flashlight batteries.

Anyways, survival isn't always about facing life or death actions each and every moment. You take care of what you have to, and if you can't extricate, then you may have some time on your hands with nothing really to do for a bit. It may not be all the time, or even some of the time, but it can occur. It is nice to have something to do that isn't based on do or die mentality. If you think survival is only when you are in a grotto full of gators and snakes with no way out, you may have missed the point. I would agree, nontheless, that situation is also a survival one. A rather immediate, extreme one at that, and I wouldn't think of pulling my harmonica out then, unless it was to play tapps as I went down in the pile for the last time.