“INTENSE DESIRE”
Now, here is a very important question. I need you to think very
carefully about your answer before you respond. If you were in the
wilderness, far away from civilization, and you were trapped with your
arm stuck between two trees so that you were unable to free yourself, and
you were bleeding very heavily, and if the only way you could possibly
free yourself was to cut your arm off at the forearm with a pocket knife,
could you actually do it?
Think very carefully. You will die for sure if you do nothing. What
will you do? Does fear of death actually turn into a tremendous drive to
make us forge ahead with the unknown? Is the will to live that powerful?
Don’t assume here. Don’t think that because you may have never done
something so drastic before, you couldn’t actually perform the act of
cutting off your arm in order to live.
It’s possible that the person who is typically considered the bravest
may not be able to cut his arm off in order to survive, while the most
timid, normally unmotivated person may be the first one to act. We
never know for sure until we are faced with such a deadly decision
whether we would be able to make such a determination. On the one
hand, just a few slight slices of the arm’s skin may be so excruciating
that the act of cutting would actually force you to change your mind.
But on the other hand, the thought of leaving your loved ones behind
might actually give you the motivation to continue the tedious and
excruciating act of cutting off the arm and living. Have you made up
your mind? Do you want to live?
“The brick walls are there for a reason. Right? The brick walls are not
there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how
badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people
who don’t want it badly enough.”
—Randy Pausch
Can we each break through that imaginary brick wall, the one
that in our minds appears impenetrable? I say yes. Each of us can do
the unspeakable, the so-called impossible, something neither we nor
anyone who knows us intimately would believe us capable of. We may
not actually know whether we can accomplish this seemingly impossible
action until we are forced to make that tough decision when our backs
are flat against the wall.
If you corner a rat, it will attack. If a mother’s child is at risk, she will
do anything in her power to spare that child. And if that child is pinned
under a car, that same mother can lift the car weighing thousands of
pounds in order to free her own flesh and blood.
“Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly
you are doing the impossible”.
—St. Francis of Assisi
Here are two examples of the tremendous will to live and what some
people can do if their lives are in danger:
On September 11, 2007, Sampson Parker was harvesting corn on
his South Carolina farm when his hand got sucked into his old corn
picker. As he fought to pull out his gloved hand, the machine’s rollers
pulled his arm in deeper.
Parker stuck an iron rod into the machine’s sprockets to try to slow
down the machine’s pull on his arm. But instead, this action caused
sparks to shoot out and set the ground around him on fire. With his
skin melting from the flames, Parker had to make a tough decision: die
from the fire spreading around him or cut off his arm and try to escape.
With a pocket knife, he proceeded to cut through his arm and
deliberately fell hard to the ground to break through his arm bone, thus
severing it from the machine that refused to release it. Parker, with a
great loss of blood, proceeded to walk some miles until he was rescued.
While hiking along in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park, climber
Aron Ralston was descending from a mountain through a three-foot wide
section of the canyon when, suddenly, an eight-hundred-pound
boulder shifted and pinned him by his right arm. Unable to free himself
for four days, and running out of food and water, Ralston had to make a
tough decision. He concluded that he could either try to cut off his arm
to free himself, or he would surely die all alone where he was, pinned
hopelessly by the huge rock.
So, Ralston proceeded to use a dull pocket knife to cut off his right
arm just below the elbow. He thought it out carefully beforehand.
Ralston knew that he had to cut his arm at the joint so he could separate
it at the elbow. He also knew he needed to minimize blood loss, so he
applied his own tourniquet. After severing his arm, Ralston lowered
himself approximately sixty feet to the canyon floor and began to walk
some five miles to reach his truck.
Finally, Ralston was found when a rescue helicopter that had been
alerted to his disappearance spotted him.
When interviewed by National Geographic Adventure in August of
2004, Ralston was asked, “But how did someone who had been repulsed
by dissecting a sheep’s eyeball in ninth-grade science class manage to
sever his own hand?”
Ralston answered, “It was strange. I kind of entered a flow state. I’ve
been there before while climbing. You are not thinking ahead. You are
just thinking about what is in front of you each second.”
Ralston went on to say that the pain was a hundred times worse
than anything he had ever felt before.”
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