The Analysis of Narrative - Essay Example

Lisa and her friends were on a camping trip at the foothills of the Himalayas. At twenty-five, with a great job under her belt and her fiancé Brian who was taking her on a road trip to the hills of India, she felt happy, lucky, almost invincible. It helped that most of the guys in the group had a thing for her, and some of the girls were quite green in the gills. Not that she was interested, she always told herself, but it felt nice that even the chubby seventeen-year-old Roger was all calf-eyed around her.

Brian was the tall, wiry sort with a passion for rock-climbing and biking. After a whole day spent rafting on the river, he was leading the pack on to what he called a little jaunt on the rocks. Lisa had always been afraid of heights, but never let on in front of Brian or the others. The group of reckless youngsters kept climbing, and she followed. Brian was way ahead of her, exhorting the group to keep going. “Come on, you all, we haven’t got all day!” she heard him say.

Lisa could hear the river gurgling below, and the hill seemed somehow empty of air. She kept going, until suddenly the root she had gripped with her left hand slithered out of the loose earth like a clumsy snake, with nothing else around to grasp, only sheer, smooth, rock. She was hanging on to the trunk of a sapling with her right hand. When Lisa glanced down, she realized that in climbing up a short incline of a few feet, she was actually hanging above a gorge a few hundred feet deep with her feet on a loose rock.

She choked, and the sound made Roger, who was puffing ahead of her, look down. “Hold on, he said, “I will come to fetch you”. Lisa could barely breathe, her ears ringing, and she merely nodded her head. Her muscles screaming under the strain, she held on, not daring to move an inch. She wanted to cry out for Brian, but he was nowhere in sight. Roger was calm, all reassurance: “Give me your hand, don’t worry, I won’t let you go”. Fear squeezing her heart, she put her left hand in his and with a wrench let go of the sapling and gave him her right hand as well. She felt a sharp, half decaying tang of mortality in her breath, and then Roger had pulled her up. “Are you alright?” offered Roger, and she nodded, drawing in long shaking breaths, “Thanks, I’m alright now…….. thanks to you.”

As she sat on a rock on that sun-dappled afternoon, she did not feel quite so invincible and realized that this is perhaps why the human race is given fear, pain and death. She thought of that intense, spontaneous burst of prayer that issued from her soul as she let go of her grip on the hill, a prayer of surrender into hands more powerful than her own, than Roger’s, more powerful even than those of even the strongest man on earth. It was a prayer that was almost as viscerally painful as the fear, and of course stronger, because she had lived to tell the tale.

Suddenly, none of it mattered. Liza realized that at that moment close to certain death, it did not matter that she was the most attractive girl in the group, that she had a plush job or even the dashing Brian. Lisa was quiet throughout the rest of the trip. Next year, she returned to the Himalayan foothills. To everyone’s surprise, she had broken her engagement, resigned from her job, and literally shut down her life in London, to become a renunciate at a Buddhist temple. A moment of utter humility, surrender, and desperate longing for life had changed Lisa forever.