Feeling great breathing in the fresh air as you hike along a trail through the forest, it’s a great feeling knowing that all in your life is good, you have a great job, live in a beautiful house with a loving partner.
Nice looking back at the wonderful exciting experiences over the past 25 years while soaking up the beauty of nature surrounding you, you realise that you’ve been so lucky but at the end of the day you’ve worked hard at this. Funny how the harder you’ve worked the luckier you’ve become, well in some peoples eyes that’s the case.
You are hiking along loving what you see around you when you come across a tricky section where there is a steep wet bank sloping down to a fast running river on one side and a steep rocky slope on the other. You know it’s potentially dangerous but as long as you are careful you should be able to negotiate the path running along the ridge, so slowly but carefully you edge along towards the other side. It shouldn’t be a problem and you’ve faced far more dangerous obstacles in your life so far.
Everything seems fine until for some unknown reason your foot slips on a muddy part, your feet both shoot out from under you and you fall awkwardly on your side and begin to slide down what you realise is an extremely slippy slope. Desperately you grasp at plants and rocks, arms and legs flailing about but you are constantly slipping further and further down towards what you know will be your death in the wide fast flowing water.
You manage to stop your descent by grasping onto what looks like a deeply rooted plant, you’ve stopped temporarily and reach for another plant so you can get back up the slope to safety. Then a horrible feeling as the first plant comes loose and the desperation is flashing through your body again, another plant and partly buried rock are in sight so you use your fingertips to hold on even though it seems nigh on impossible.
You hear a voice coming from the side you walked from shouting that they are calling for help, the rescue team will be here soon and everything will be alright. Meanwhile the hold you have by your fingertips has broken so you are sliding again picking up momentum to your certain end.
Then amazingly your foot stops on a protruding rock, this is great, surely now you’ll be able to get into a better position so the rescue team who’ve arrived will be able to get you out of this. The slow dripping of muddy water is making things very difficult, your clothes are getting very wet and covered in mud making them very heavy and so tiring to move.
The rescue team are there at the top but are shouting to me that the overhanging trees, narrow path and the muddy water is making it impossible to get to me. So what they’ll do is throw some hooks that will enable me to wedge myself against the slope, I won’t be able to get back up but I will be able to slow my descent.
So their plan is not to save me but to slow down my impending death, not acceptable but all thats on offer.
So if this was you, would you A) stay where you are laying flat against the muddy bank waiting for death after your arms and legs have become too tired to hold on any longer, or B) do whatever you can to get back to the top and safety.
OK so this is me…The rescue team or the medical practitioners have told me there is nothing that they or anyone can do for me.
So option A is definitely a big NoNo as far as I’m concerned, option B means that I’m going to do whatever I can, every day I’m going to look for a way back, I’ll try whatever is available, eat whatever I need to, try every unction and potion on God’s green earth until I find a way back to safety.
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