Yesterday while flipping channels I came across the documentary “I Am Alive: Surviving the Andes Plane Crash,” on the History Channel. It chronicled the true story of a rugby team from Uruguay whose plane crashed while en route to Chile in 1972.
They were trapped in an Argentine mountain region so remote that it didn’t even have a name.
After 72 days of being stranded and surviving below zero weather and a snow avalanche, two of the survivors, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, decided to cross the mountains to find help to rescue the remaining passengers. By this time only sixteen of the forty-five passengers were alive.
Their conditions had become so bad they began to eat the dead bodies in order to survive. They had no other source of food on the plane. However, it wasn’t a decision they made easily.
Parrado and Canessa walked for ten days over snow covered mountains and eventually found a farmer who was able to assist them and get help to rescue the remaining survivors.
What amazed me about their story was their desire to live. They did everything in their means to survive. What I learned watching the documentary is that the human will is remarkable.
They had to cross almost 2,000 feet of snow-covered mountains on simply their will. When asked how they did it, Parrado said that they put one foot in front of the other and never gave up.
How does this translate to you and I? Luckily most of us will never have to survive what these Uruguayan young men did. However, we often forget what we’re able to accomplish. Our mind is an amazing instrument that can be used to accomplish whatever it is that we want.
We just need to take one step at a time and never look back or give up reaching our dreams. It’s that simple.
What is the one step you’ll take today!