Miracle In The Andes Persuasive Essay Topics

A survivor is someone who can take the pressure of the hardship they may go through in life. Can push their limits and do things they may not want to do. A survivor is someone who stays strong and positive in a time of doubt, or to have hope when the situation seems hopeless. Someone who does not give up no matter how much they want to. Instead he keeps his head up because he knows that he has his friends and family waiting for him when he comes home. A survivor needs motivation to survive situations of doubt and hopelessness.
When facing challenges in life, motivation is very important in mental survival. The book Miracle in the Andes, mental motivation is needed to survive. In the book, the perspective is from Nando Parrado, one of the survivors

of the Andes plane crash, when his entire rugby team went down, and many others, on their way to a rugby tournament.

Parrado is going through a really tough time in this specific part of the book, when he wanted to give up because he was hopeless that he would never be rescued from the mountains. He then remembers something that his father had told him prior the this event.He told parrado that when he was a rower, he struggled to keep going, but he pushed through it. Parrado says “So I decided I would not quit after all. I decided I would suffer a little longer”(Parrado 42). His fathers experience as a rower, when he raced he was suffering but kept going through motivation, so Parrado felt motivated to go on through the suffering a little longer and push himself mentally to live. In the article “Catching Kayla” by Lindsay Crouse, a girl who struggles with M.S. uses motivation to survive as well. Kayla is a long distance track runner, who has a disease that ha the side effect of making her legs numb when she runs and gets hot, but she keeps on running. In the article her coach says “If M.S. has made her a better athlete, I believe it is a mental

edge”(crouse). Kayla would not be able to run without her telling herself that she can so it. After every race, she goes crashing into her coaches arms at the finish line because she is not able to feel her legs, and without her mentally saying that she will finish that race, she would do that in the middle. She pushes herself to be the best runner she can even though she has M.S. as her disadvantage.This shows how mental motivation is needed to survive, but it takes more then just mental motivation not get through the hard times.
Not only does someone have to be motivated mentally, but physically as well. In another part of the book Miracle in the Andes, Parrado has to keep himself under control physically so that he can continue to live. He says “ I suppressed my anxieties and my maddening urge to escape too long. I couldn’t stay at the crash site one moment longer”(Parrado 147). This is showing how he is pushing past his emotional stage and wants to get out of the mountains even if it means risking his life. He knows that if he does not try to get out of there, him and the other survivors will die. That is why he is trying to push himself physically. In another article, “Just Keep Breathing” by Ira Glass, a girl who wants to stay anonymous uses her physical motivation to save herself from a shark attack that almost kills her. She was at the beech one day when she got attacked by a shark. When she went to the doctor, the basically just gave her pain medications, stitched her up, and sent her home. When she told her parents later on that she thought she was dying, her parents did not believe her, and that is when she had to fight for her own life. She says “And my mom looked over, and she said, aren’t you lucky the doctors saved you? And I couldn’t talk, because I was on life support ventilators for my lungs so that I could breath. And I indicated for paper and pencil. And i wrote, I saved myself. Underline. Underline. Underline”(Glass). Her parents not believing that she was dying, and her having to fight for her own life with no help shows that she physically pushed herself to survive. Without her keeping her eyes open and not falling apart shows how motivation helped her be a survivor.
To survive, social motivation is needed as well.

In Miracle in the Andes, Parrado felt hopeless, and that he would never see his family again, but he pushed himself to think about his family so that he would survive. He says “For the first time since the crash, I felt feal hope. I would live. I would see my father again. I was sure of it”(Parrado 221). His father was the only person left that he had to live for, since his mother and sister had both died. His father being there at the end of his journey motivated him to keep pushing forward, no matter how hard it seems. In the song “Under Pressure” by David Bowie, social motivation is also shown. The song talks about how everyone goes through hard times, and a person never knows what could be going on in someone's life just by seeing them on the streets or in public without actually knowing who they are. He says :And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves”(Bowie). This shows how if a person has someone that they love and care about, and that care about them back, there is a change of mindset that goes on. A person will start to care more about themselves for the other person's well being. That is why social motivation is

important.
In conclusion, motivation is the key to survival. No matter what kind of motivation, as long as it’s positive, it could keep a person going. If a person isn’t motivated there would be no hope of living through the hard times, and pushing to be a survivor, that is why motivation is important.