Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 134 - Rock
What’s the worst situation you’ve ever found yourself in? More importantly, what did you do next?
Welcome to Issue 134 of Deep Life Reflections, where each Friday I share reflections on how to live more deeply, inspired by literature, cinema, and life itself.
This week, we explore what happens when a person is pushed to the edge: physically, emotionally, and spiritually. What drives someone to sacrifice safety, relationships, and even sanity for the one thing that makes them feel most alive? Two powerful works shape our thinking, each offering a character broken by life’s extremes. But while their circumstances may feel similar, their responses couldn’t be more different.
Join me for this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Between a Rock and a Hard Place. By Aron Ralston.
“I will die here. I will waste away here. I will shrivel up, slumping here with my arm trapped in this place, when dehydration decides to stop toying around and finally kills me.”
Most of us will thankfully never face the predicament Aron Ralston found himself in on a spring day in April 2003. Pinned by a half ton boulder, his right hand crushed, trapped deep inside a remote section of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. No phone. No-one looking. Just two small burritos, less than 500ml of water, and a blunt pen knife. No-one even knew he was missing.
“We know that the condemned man, at the end, does not resist but submits passively, almost gratefully, to the instrument of his executioner.” — Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Ralston, an experienced solo adventurer, lived for remote landscapes and high-risk challenges. His memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, recounts in excruciating detail his six days of imprisonment and what he finally had to do to break free: cut off his right arm below the elbow.
Danny Boyle turned the book into an Academy Award-nominated film in 2010, 127 Hours. While the film captures the emotional intensity and physical trauma, the book provides more layers, especially Ralston’s evolving mindset, his outdoorsman philosophy, and his eventual spiritual awakening. His writing is clear and direct, his thoughts articulate and honest. He recognises his love of extremes, his preference for solitude, and how these traits sometimes made him selfish.
Ralston is only a month older than me, both born in 1975. Like him, I enjoy solitude. And like everyone who knows his story, I’ve contemplated whether I’d have it in me to do what he eventually did. And the truthful answer is I don’t know. Who knows what we are capable of under such dire circumstances.
We are with Ralston in that freezing canyon. We taste his terrible thirst, the numbness in his arm (his hand crushed so completely it severed the nerves; at least sparing him some pain), and his violent swings between hope and hopelessness. We practically gag when he’s reduced to drinking his own putrid urine.
Throughout the book, there’s a sense of fate. Ralston had flirted with death more than once—stalked by a grizzly bear, nearly drowned, buried in an avalanche. He believed that boulder, which had stood unmoved for thousands of years, was waiting for him. That he alone would have to face it. While he applied his patience and problem-solving to every possible escape, there were long, dark periods of resignation.
Near the end, accepting death, he takes out his camcorder to record messages about the memories he’d shared with friends and family. Not solo climbs or remote treks, but time spent with others. Recalling these moments changes something in him. He realises that for all his love of solitude, the most meaningful parts of his life were with others. That he wasn’t as alone or selfish as he’d thought. This becomes life-affirming. He sees how lucky he is to have those people in his life.
Then comes the epiphany: people hadn’t chosen him as a friend because he was a climber, an adventurer, a risk-taker. They chose him because of who he was, and how he made them feel.
As he puts it: “Maybe that’s what I’m here to learn.”
His eventual release comes as a spiritual awakening. After more than 120 hours welded to that immovable rock, Ralston solved the riddle of his imprisonment—leveraging his body to break the bones in his arm, then sawing through nerve, tissue, and cartilage with the less blunt of his two blades. Rather than horror, he described it as a rebirth, ecstatic at the opportunity to live: “the most intense feeling of my life… For the second time in my life, I am being born.”
It’s an exhilarating passage to read.
Aron Ralston’s story of entrapment and freedom became a global sensation. Of the many letters he received, one stood out. It was from a woman who wrote to say she had flushed her late husband’s stockpile of sleeping pills down the toilet after reading his story:
“Your act of bravery has inspired me to hold on more dearly. I had promised myself that I would end my life if things had not gotten better one year after my husband’s death. I now know suicide is not the answer. You inspire me to stay strong, remain brave, and to fight for life.”
When the world pins us down, we often need to make hard choices: sometimes cutting something out and leaving it behind.
But farewell can also be a powerful beginning.
2. What I’m Watching
The Wrestler (2008). Directed by Darren Aronofsky.
Shot in 35 days on a shoestring budget, The Wrestler is a raw, documentary-style film that feels as real as the anguish it unleashes.
Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson is a former wrestling star of the 1980s. Now well into middle-age, he’s living, barely, in a trailer park, working behind the meat counter of a deli, and still clinging to the ring. Not Wrestlemania, not millions on TV. These days it’s small-town gyms and community centres, performing for die-hard fans who still remember him. For Randy, the past is a hard thing to let go of.
Randy, real name Robin Ramzinski, is played by a phenomenal Mickey Rourke, a performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination. Rourke brings a bruised physicality and emotional depth to the role, inhabiting Randy completely. He gives him a face and a heart. Randy is, at his core, a good man who’s made a lot of bad decisions. One look at his battered face and body reminds us just how many punches he’s taken, both in and out of the ring.
This isn’t a sports film. You don’t need to like or even understand wrestling. It’s a character study. About relationships, the past, pride, holding on to the things we can’t seem to let go of. Trying to make up for mistakes.
Randy tries to reconnect with his estranged adult daughter, but fails, as we expect him to. He’s badly out of his depth as a father. He tries to build a relationship with a stripper, Cassidy, (played by an excellent Marisa Tomei, also Academy Award-nominated), and fails again, despite their chemistry and shared sense of unbelonging.
Randy is pretty bad at life. But we see his effort, his flickers of integrity. We root for the guy. Then he’ll do something reckless—something we see coming a mile off—and we withdraw some of that sympathy. That complexity is all down to Rourke.
There’s one thing Randy is good at—and loves. Wrestling. From the fake tan and sunbeds to the peroxide-blonde hair dye, steroids, and endless bicep curls, it’s a devotion, an extreme. Randy isn’t just drawn to the physicality, the actual wrestling, but the camaraderie. In the dressing room and the ring, he’s respected. He’s The Ram. Younger wrestlers come to him for advice. Older ones hug. These scenes feel so real because they are: real wrestlers in real venues saying real words.
While the outcome of a wrestling match is decided in advance—the ‘fix’ of wrestling—how they get there is largely left to the two wrestlers. In one brutal scene, we watch a wrestler with the colourful name of Necro Butcher jam a staple gun into Randy’s bloody face. These guys get hurt. The pain is real. So real, in fact, Randy suffers a heart attack after the match and ends up in hospital, undergoing open-heart surgery. I winced when I saw him peel back the massive square plaster to reveal a fresh 10-inch scar down his chest, bringing back memories of my own.
Told by doctors to stop wrestling, Randy tries a shot at ‘normal’ life but can’t make it stick. His relationship with Cassidy, real name Pam, offers a potential way out. Their scenes are warm and human. Like Randy, she’s also playing a role, working to earn enough money to create a better life for herself and her young son. Both are clinging to identities, but Pam seems better equipped to let hers go, fulfilling that destiny when she eventually walks away from stripping.
But Randy can’t walk away from his.
Not for Pam. Not for his daughter. Not even for Robin. He is The Ram. He needs it.
In the ring, he hears the crowd.
Outside it, there’s nothing.
3. What I’m Contemplating
The two works this week follow two men in physical and emotional crisis. One is real, the other fictional, but both recognisable.
Aron Ralston and Randy Robinson are defined by extremes: extreme isolation, extreme risk, extreme need for purpose. Each is driven by a devotion that borders on addiction: Ralston to nature and solo adventure, Randy to performance and the adrenaline of the ring. Both are trying to feel alive by doing what they love.
But when they reach their breaking point, their paths diverge.
Ralston sheds identity and chooses transformation.
Randy clings to his and chooses denial.
Randy is spiritually trapped. His life outside the ring is disintegrating, but he can’t stop chasing the ghost of who he once was. He searches for meaning in the past, not the future. Randy only feels real when he’s pretending to be someone else. He can’t make peace with his real self. As he puts it:
“The only place I get hurt is out there [the world].”
That’s what makes The Wrestler so hard to watch. This story is all too common.
Ralston, by contrast, is literally pinned by nature, his body trapped. Yet, his mind starts to open. There’s a humility in the way he accepts what must be done. He’s not rescued. He rescues himself. His transformation isn’t just physical but existential. And by doing so, he inspired others to find their own way out of the abyss.
Ralston’s story gives us the opportunity to reflect on what gives our lives coherence and where we might be able to inspire others. We don’t need to amputate an arm or scale a canyon wall.
Sometimes, just like the rock, the thing we need to face is right in front of us.
Waiting for us.
Waiting for us to see what we’ve got.
4. A Quote to note
“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.”
- Horace, Roman poet.
5. A Question for you
When was the last time you chose to face something hard, rather than wait to be rescued—and what did you learn about yourself?
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