Often when people are hearing the challenges in my life and the events I have been experiencing, they are referring to a certain skill to "survive".
Let's explore first the etymology of the verb "survive":
mid-15c. (implied in surviving), "to outlive, continue in existence after the death of another," originally in the legal (inheritance) sense, from Anglo-French survivre, Old French souvivre(12c., Modern French survivre), from Latin supervivere "live beyond, live longer than," from super "over, beyond".
My own thoughts after reading it is that in order to "survive" one must overcome a life-threatening situation. You want to life, you want to continue to live, and this is all about with the instinct of surviving. This is a more animalistic in its nature. And what about the verb "sustain": late 13c., sustenen, transitive, "provide the necessities of life to;" by early 14c. as "give support to; support physically, hold up or upright; give assistance to; keep (a quarrel, etc.) going," from the stem of Old French sostenir, sustenir "hold up, bear; suffer, endure" (13c.), from Latin sustinere "hold up, hold upright; furnish with means of support; bear, undergo, endure." This is from an assimilated form of sub "up from below" (see sub-) + tenere "to hold" (from PIE root *ten- "to stretch").
The meaning "continue, keep up" (an action, etc.) is from early 14c. The sense of "endure (pain hardship, a shock) without failing or yielding" is from c. 1400. The legal sense of "admit as correct and valid" is from early 15c. Past-participle adjective sustained is by 1775 as "kept up or maintained uniformly," originally of music notes; the piano's sustaining pedal is so called by 1889 From the text above I am concluding that in order to sustain you need to endure for a longer period of time and as such to sustain means to survive but for a longer period of time. So long that it goes beyond your life span. This is why now we are talking about sustainability, because we are starting to think how to keep up our lives in a way that the future generations will also be able to live on this planet.
I will repeat over and over again and will do it because it is true: Bulgaria is an advisor for sustainability. And I mean the lineage of the Bulgarians who are aware of its ancient culture and history, history that is counting already more than 7500 years the time. Btw. in the case of Bulgaria we have kept our traditions and cultures over centuries even when we were under the rulerships of certain empires. We were, are and will call our country Bulgaria. As such we are one (and if not the) of the most long existing organisations in our modern history.
We are seeing how small and large group of people are suffering to sustain and are fighting to survive. But they are too proud to ask for an advice and support from Bulgaria. How long will they sustain? How long will they survive?