Publications
Partners
This is not a story about getting big muscles. It’s about four individuals and what they did when things were difficult for them.
Trapped by his arm
Aron Ralston’s name is familiar now and will be for some time. He’s the 27-year-old American who cut off his arm to free himself from a boulder in a Utah canyon. He was an enormously experienced outdoorsman, but after five days of pain, dehydration, hunger, hallucinations and despair, he knew he’d die soon.
He poked his trapped hand with his penknife, wondering if there was still any feeling in it, and was greeting with the hiss of escaping gas. Its circulation cut off, his hand was decomposing.
Adrift at sea
Ignacio Siberio is an 80-year-old lawyer, diver and fisherman who clung to a buoy in the Atlantic waters off Florida for 20 hours. He’d been spearfishing and his boat lost its anchor, leaving him adrift, 15 kms from land.
The buoy had the number 731, a seemingly good omen: his birth-date of July 31. But after a night of unseen sea creatures brushing against his feet, he’d had enough.
Coping with MS
Jim Sweeney is a Briton who’s had multiple sclerosis for 19 years. His vision has deteriorated; he has great difficulty walking and suffers from mood swings, memory problems and muscle spasms.
D-Day for Eisenhower
Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War Two. The rank made him one of the most powerful people on earth. When the Allies were poised on the shores of Britain they awaited his orders to cross the English Channel and start the D-Day Landings, arguably the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Axis powers.
Eisenhower knew the landings could easily fail and, even if successful, would cost thousands of lives.
In the end his decision was in laconic Americanese that sits far less easily with the world than it once did. He just said: “Okay, let’s go.”
Brave decisions
In the same way, Jim Sweeney opted to not bemoan the brutally debilitating disease that plagues him, but to take it on the stage, in a show called "Me and My MS", which was on at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. It earned critical acclaim and tears of laughter and sorrow from audiences.
Ignacio Siberio let go of the buoy stamped with his birth-date and started swimming for the shore. He was later rescued.
Aron Ralston snapped the bones in his arm, and then amputated it with his knife before hiking and abseiling to find his rescuers.
Each of these men faced a difficult choice and opted for a daunting, risky and traumatic option. For any guy who wakes in the morning to face something more challenging than which luxury yacht to play with, there are choices that challenge, even thought they might not be life-threatening: stay in a relationship or break up; stay in a job or go on your own; keep using “manageable” amounts of drugs or get help; keep admiring her from afar or ask her out.
It takes a certain bloody-minded obstinacy, as well as an almost self-delusional faith in your chances of success. For people like the ones mentioned, as well as Nelson Mandela, Richard Branson and Stephen Hawking, the ability to ignore the possibility of failure was crucial.
In her novel "The Shipping News", Annie Proulx describes her protagonist, Coyle, adrift in the freezing waters off Newfoundland, holding on to a red cooler-box. When he’s eventually fished out and revived, Coyle says he stayed alive by imagining that the red box was a blazing coal keeping him warm in the ice-littered sea.
Coyle chose to ignore the reality of the plastic box, just as Jim Sweeney chose to ignore the odds of his audiences looking the other way, away from the reality of his “condition”. Ralston chose to ignore the agony to come and the likelihood of bleeding to death in the desert. Siberio chose to ignore the fact that he might well have been speeding his own demise by leaving the buoy and trying to swim to safety.
The moments of truth that Ralston, Siberio, Eisenhower and Sweeney faced may be more momentous than any most of us will, but sometimes, it’s time to say, like Ike did, “Okay, let’s go.” – (William Smook)
