Hello ((((((Roomies))))))

Sorry this is so long..he he.. but I just had to!

I had one of those moments today, that I thought I would share about.

I was discussing a movie I watched with a friend, a movie called “Touching the Void” the true story of two men who had an adventure while trying to climb the Siula Grande Mountains of Peru.

Too make a long amazing story as short as I can, the two men succeed in scaling a previously unscaled mountain face and on the way down one of the men suffers a badly broken leg. These two men are attached to each other by a rope and after his friend breaks his leg, one of the climbers, Simon, attempts to lower his friend down the mountain 300 feet at a time with the rope that tied the two together.

At first this seems impossible, but as they begin the process it appears that they will succeed. After some time, a situation occurs where by, Joe, the man with the broken leg, winds up hanging in mid air. Now Simon does not have the ability to raise his friend back up, and Joe cannot go either up or down. So they are stuck at an impass. It is brutally cold there, and Simon, up at the top of the rope can do nothing but hang on. The situation becomes worse, because Simon is unable to maintain his position in the snow and is gradually being dragged down the slope as well. If he doesn’t do something, both men will fall to their deaths.

It becomes obvious that Simon has two options. The first option is to “stay the course” of trying to hold on to his friend, wherein he will either die from being pulled off the side of the mountain himself, or die from exposure. The second option is that he must cut the rope. If he cuts the rope they will at least have a chance to survive. If he doesn’t cut it they are both surely going to die. He must make a choice.

Simon cuts the rope.

He then begins to make his way down the mountain. When he comes to the place his friend should have been he sees that he has fallen into a crevice. He does not see him, but is sure he could not have survived.

Simon is devastated by the guilt of what he was forced to do. He is beset with thoughts of just sitting down and dying such is his pain at what has happened. But after some inner struggle, he continues on. And successfully makes it off the mountain and back to base camp.

Miraculously, Joe survives the fall. But now he is alone, with a broken leg. He has two choices. Sit there and die, or try to crawl down the mountain. He makes the decision that he does not want to die alone. And so, he begins his descent. He literally has to scoot and crawl down the mountain, because his badly broken leg is useless. When he crawls out of the crevice and onto the side of the mountain again, he can see how far he has to go, many many miles, and is overwhelmed by it. He just wants to give up, from the sheer impossibility of the task. But he decides instead to focus on short little trips to a nearby landmark. And sets time limits on himself. He will get to that rock in twenty minutes for example. And he does this over and over and over and over.

To seriously over simplify the monumental task he performs, he continues to struggle in these short little trips, until he has done them all the way down the mountain, two days after Simon. He makes it to within 300 yards of base camp, in the dark and can smell the camp. He cries out in the darkness for his friend Simon and gets no answer. And he just collapses. Simon, who has amazingly not left base camp for two days hears his friend cry out in the dark and goes to him. And again to make a long story short, they survive, though Joe spends the next 9 months in hospitals getting over his ordeal.

Okay, now for the connection I made with this story.

How many of us are like Simon? Bound by a life line to our own “Joe”. We spend day after day trying to help them down their own mountains. Lowering them the best we can, trying to be gentle but sometimes letting the rope slip a little and perhaps causing them some pain. Trying to control the best we can their descent. Perhaps not without some resentment towards them for “breaking their leg” in the first place.

And we continue to do this until we too realize that we can’t do it anymore. That they have gotten themselves into a place, through their own actions that we are unable to rescue them from. We can’t continue to bear their load without risking the loss of ourselves. How many of us have gotten to the point that we too finally realize, that either we cut the rope and trust that things will work out, or we keep hanging on until everything is lost?

And then I look at Joe’s struggle. That began in earnest the moment that Simon cut that rope. No longer could he rely on his friend’s help to survive. He had to do it himself. He had to decide, lay down and die, or try to live. And he saw the task before him was monumental. Just as those Joes in our lives face a long road to recovery, and of course we ourselves do too. I just smiled to myself when he started setting himself those little attainable goals instead of trying to grasp the whole journey at one instant. Focusing not on the whole path ahead, but rather on the next 20 minutes. The next 20 feet.

And when Joe made it down and back to camp. There was Simon. What if Simon had given up? What if he hadn’t cut that rope? What if even after cutting the rope he listened to the voices in his head that were trying to drag him down…telling him he had betrayed his friend. That he was a coward. That he didn’t deserve to live after what he had done. He would do best to just dig a hole in the snow, crawl into it and die.

If he had listened, they both would still have died, even after Joe’s journey down the mountain.

This was such a perfect story of survival to me. A perfect example of the recovery that we can all have for ourselves. We have to put ourselves first to be of any use to anyone else. We have to have faith. We have to have the strength, when all else has failed and we know in our hearts it is our higher power’s will, to cut that rope.

Cutting the rope isn’t abandonment. Sometimes it’s the only way. The way of truth. The way of love.

If you made it this far, I'm impressed!!!

Give yourself a cookie!!!!

Yours in Recovery,

David