One step at a time

There's a moment in the documentary Touching the Void that sticks with me. Joe Simpson is alone on a Peruvian glacier — leg shattered, climbing partner gone, basically no reason to think he's going to make it. The distance between him and base camp is enormous. Too enormous to think about, really.

So he stops thinking about it.

He picks a rock. Just one rock, maybe fifty metres away, and that becomes his whole world. “Get to that rock.” Not to base camp, not to safety — just to that rock. And when he gets there, he picks another. That's how he survived. Not through some superhuman feat of toughness (well, okay, partly that), but by making the problem small enough to actually deal with.

I think about that a lot. Because when we're living with disability, that's not some dramatic mountain survival technique. It's just... how we get through the week.

On a bad day, ordinary stuff can be enormous challenges in a way that's hard to explain to people without our life context. Getting dressed. Making breakfast. Composing an email. Things that seem like nothing can feel, when your body or brain isn't cooperating, like staring up at something unclimbable. And if you make the mistake of looking at everything you need to do all at once — yeah, that's when you don't get off the couch.

What's helped me is doing what Joe Simpson did. Don't look at the whole mountain. Just pick a rock.

That might mean not "brushing and flossing" but just getting to the bathroom first. Not "making dinner" but just opening the fridge. It sounds almost too simple, but there's something real that happens when you take a decision and then actually complete a small step — even a tiny one. It's evidence. Proof that things are moveable. And somehow that makes the next step feel a little less impossible.

I'm not saying it's easy, or that it works every single time. Some days the rocks feel miles apart too. But it's the approach that's gotten me through more hard patches than I can count, and I don't think I'm alone in that.

Joe Simpson didn't crawl back to base camp. He crawled to a rock. Then another. Then another. And eventually — almost without meaning to — he got there.

How do you eat a whale? One spoonful at a time.