My Personal Meteorite

So I watched a movie tonight that could only have been made for me. It's called 127 hours. It's one of those works that doesn't condone ambivalence; you either like it or you don't. I loved it.

It is a true-life story, but a relatively simple plot. A young carefree, adventurous man goes hiking in the grand canyon, gets stuck somewhere and through that experience relieves and changes his life. It's the execution and the details that get you.

The man Aron Ralston- google him- fell into a hole in the rock he was walking on, and as he descended, his arm got caught in between another relatively smaller rock that fell with him, and the large canyon slab that he had been walking on. Left with very little water and absolutely no other supplies, on the 5th day, he had to amputate his arm to free himself.

Now initially when I was watching the movie and seeing the guy hiking and jumping all by himself I thought that was dangerous. What if sth happened to him. And then it did. And that was the point of... I guess, his life.

You see as time progressed in the hole, Aron began to have flashbacks and hallucinations, and his life pretty much flashed before his eyes. For a lack of food he picked the contacts out of his eyes, into his mouth, and as he did that he remembered how he had refused to pick up the phone, the morning of the first day, when his mum called just because he couldn't be bothered from putting on his contacts, leaving it to go to the answering machine. He remembered how he deliberately did not tell his boss where he was going because he didn't feel like. He remembered the good times he had with his family and friends, but how he just walked away from them all, at one time or the other, discarding their friendship. Now no one had any idea where he was because he didn't want to tell anyone. You see he had that I-can-do-it-all-by-myself attitude that a few people have.

But the epiphany for him (and me) came in these words which I have paraphrased "I realized then that this rock had been waiting for me all my life...The meteorite had fallen... Everything I had done, every step I had taken had drawn me closer to the time when I would fall into this crack in the earth".

I almost wept at these words. For some people, a wake up call from God/the Universe or whatever you call it, can be a gentle whisper. For others a firm shaking, but for a few it's a blow over the head, a heavy,painful knock that makes you feel your core.

I am at my rock, my knock and my wake-up call. In the situation I am in everything I believed and trusted is being questioned. Everything I ran to for comfort has failed me. I am. Likely in need of an overhaul. And there must be a reason why this message is delivered with such intensity. I must decipher the message and not bother about the medium.

When Aron amputated his arm and turned to leave, he said something to the rock, even in his pain. It's the same words I speak into the universe tonight : Thank you.

Chili
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.

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