Blind and Sighted

Today, my teacher told me an uplifting story that I thought I would share here. My teacher knows someone who has been blind since he was a baby. He wasn't born blind, but he was born premature and only weighed two pounds. Now this is back in 1953 when doctors didn't know what to do with a two-pound baby. So they put him into an incubator. Unfortunately, the oxygen level in the incubator was so high that it burnt his retinas and so the boy was able to see for a day and was blind for the rest of his life. This person, however, did not consider himself disabled. Having grown up blind, he adapted to it very well. He does not use a seeing-eye dog, just a walking stick, and he counts his steps so he knows where to go. Sometimes, he'll still walk into the wrong house, but he just asks people where he is so there's no problem there. He also makes very good money working at the Social Security Administration and even learned how to drive. Seriously, he'll just say, "Let's go to the movies!" and then proceed to drive everyone to the movies.

This man ended up marrying a blind woman. Now the woman did not grow up blind, but gradually began losing her sight when she was a teenager. She became completely blind at the age of sixteen and, unlike her husband, considered herself disabled. She was not used to being blind and it was not until a year later, when she got a seeing-eye dog, that her disability "disappeared." The assistance of a seeing-eye dog opened up a whole new world to her and now she gets around very well.

The interesting thing about this couple is that their first children were a set of twins. Who were sighted. It must have been a very interesting household for two blind parents to raise two children who could see. Of course, they had lots of help from their social support group, but they tapped into their creativity as well. For example, they tied bells onto the shoes of the children so they could tell where the children were located in the house at all times. Simple, elegant, and practical.

That story was just so uplifting for me to hear. I love that the people who are often termed "disabled" aren't really disabled at all, and live very fulfilling, well-rounded lives. It's a great testament to the human spirit and human ability.

Old Smells

I was walking home from school today when I caught a sudden whiff of pine and maple. It immediately brought back childhood memories, mostly of books, old and yellowed. It's like when I open an old book and stick my nose into the binding and inhale. It also strongly reminded of thrift stores and antique shops, repositories of classic items and ancient collectible books. My family shopped at thrift stores all the time when I was a child and I would always head straight to the books section. Since it was a thrift store, a lot of the books were very old and worn, dating back to the 50s and 70s. I loved those old books. I loved gently opening the pages and reading the tiny, myopic, squished font and seeing how the book was turning the color of burnt toast around its edges. Ah, childhood memories.

I'm an adult now and I still head to the books section of thrift shops and stick my nose into the old books. Some things never change.

Peaceful easy feeling

I was driving home today, around ten at night, when I realized that I was feeling at peace with myself. I felt like an adult. I had moved far away from home and was making a life for myself. I went to class, I paid my bills, I'm able to live on my own...I felt very responsible. I felt capable of doing things that many people twice my age couldn't do. I looked around me as I was driving and the city lights seemed peaceful. They weren't glaring and they didn't blind me. The trees, too, silhouetted against the night sky, didn't seem to stand out any more than anything else. In other words, I felt like everything in the world had equal weight-- like nothing was more important than anything else, like no person was more important than anyone else. It was nice, this peaceful feeling. Then as I neared home, I thought, either I'm feeling very peaceful or I'm just very sleepy. Knowing me, it was probably the latter. Still, it was a nice feeling, kind of like that peaceful, floaty feeling you get right before you fall asleep. Good thing I was almost home. Almost home.

Accept and Detach

Another strange and wonderful thing happened to me last Wednesday night when I was leaving class. I was walking in the bitter cold, trying to make it back to my car so I could drive home. It was so cold that I was wearing four layers: my long-sleeved shirt, a thin jacket, a furry jacket, and an overcoat. My scarf was wound all the way around my neck and covered my mouth and nose. I walked with my shoulders hunched and my head bent down against the wind. Then I suddenly remembered something. A few days ago, I read this book where a man said that whenever he felt pain, he would open himself up to the pain and fully accept it; this, strangely enough, allowed him to detach from it. He said that if an emotion is fully accepted, even if it is pain and suffering, can one detach from the feeling. So I thought to myself, I'm feeling cold and miserable right now, but if I can accept it, then maybe I can detach from it. Besides, hunching my shoulders for so long is killing my back. So I straightened up, opened myself to the cold, and my scarf fell away from my face and neck. Suddenly, I didn't feel cold anymore. I stood there for a minute, in the back alley of some parking lot overgrown with weeds, unprotected by walls and warmth, and...I didn't feel cold anymore. I mean, sure I could still feel the wind swirling around my ankles, but it's like the cold couldn't touch me anymore, not any deeper than just the barest surface of my skin. In other words, the cold didn't bother me. Huh, I thought. Maybe there is something to this after all. Or maybe it's just the placebo effect. In either case, I walked back to my car in total comfort, no longer cold and hunched, no longer defeated by cold and wind and snow. Call it what you will. Mind over matter. Catch and release. Accept and detach. The point is, it worked.

"Is any of this real or is it all in my head?" ~Harry Potter
"Of course it's all in your head, Harry, but why does that mean it's not real?" ~Albus Dumbledore

Trust, said a gentle voice...

A strange and wonderful thing happened the other night. I woke up in tears again, overwhelmed by fears of the future, overwhelmed by thoughts of not being able to find a job or finding a job I don't like, fears of being perpetually being poor and always having to pay off debt. Will I ever amount to anything? I thought. Will I ever get myself out of debt?

Then a calm voice inside me said soothingly, Trust in yourself, remember? Trust in the future. Trust in God. Trust in your decisions and trust in yourself. And I ACTUALLY STOPPED CRYING. I just sat there, my breathing and pulse calming down. I thought, You're right. I don't know the future yet and there's no way for me to tell how it's going to turn out. 

Good, now go back to sleep, the voice said gently. So I turned on my side and went back to sleep.

P.S. I know, I know, it makes me sound crazy. It makes me sound like I'm hallucinating or hearing voices, but let me tell you something, I'll take the imaginary voices that help support and uplift me over the real-life voices of people who have humiliated me and cut me down all my life. Take from that what you will.

Staten Island Ferry

I was riding the Staten Island Ferry this morning. It was a cold, blustery day. I sat on the plastic green seats, staring out at the vast ocean waves and the seagulls flapping awkwardly near the hull of the ferry. I was thinking about life when I suddenly thought, “Life is too short to live someone else’s dream.” I don't know why it came back to me, but it made me think something about myself. Maybe I’m hypocritical. Maybe I tell OTHER people to live their own dreams while I did not do the same. I felt like a sage who did not follow her own advice, a preacher who did not believe her own sermons. I mean, here I was, IN grad school, and for what? To pursue someone else’s dream? I definitely did not plan on going to grad school when I was younger. I didn’t plan on a lot of things. But I made them happen anyway. Then I began to doubt myself. I began to ask if I was really doing this for me or if I was doing what my family wanted, what society expected. In spite of all my individualism and “find my own path” mentality, I still felt like I had sold out somehow. That I had given in the pressures of society. I felt like I had put my values in the wrong thing. Not to say that higher education is an invalid value. I know that I’m doing something for my future. I know that I’m doing something for myself, even if it means getting into a mountain of debt. Yet somehow, I feel as if this was not what I wanted. I feel like I had postponed living my life just to gamble on something that COULD be better and yet may not be. Truthfully, I was tired of the uncertainty. I was tired of the doubt. I was tired of the DEBT. And not just the debt I owed to the government for my loans, the debt I owed to my parents, to make them proud because they had given me life and raised me. I felt like my life stretched on ahead and THAT debt would never be gone. It would never evaporate or diminish.

I looked out at the New York City skyline in the distance, the tall spires and skyscrapers in the air. I thought about my dream to live there and how much it was going to cost me. I saw the Statue of Liberty and thought about how immigrants--poor, illiterate, and uneducated--somehow made a living there. I watched the seagulls as they wheeled in the air, veering towards the ferry and then banking away. I thought about how free they were…and how cold they must be sometimes. Yet they didn’t LOOK cold. They didn’t look empty and hollow, like there was a void in their lives which they were trying to fill with all the wrong things. All the wrong things. 

Then again, maybe I'm not doing this for the wrong reasons. Maybe I'm not trying to fill up my life with all the wrong things. Maybe everything WILL work out, in spite of all my doubts. Like Steve Jobs said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking back." Maybe now is not the time to look back on my life. Not yet anyway. 

Not yet.

Tea and Sunshine

The sun is shining today! It's been raining and overcast for the past five days and just this morning, the sun came out. I noticed when I was typing at the computer and I saw sunbeams streaming into the office. I was so excited that I ran to my nearest coworker and said, "The sun's shining, Nikki! The sun's shining!"

"The sun IS shining," she concurred, astonished as she watched the sunlight coming in through the window. "It wasn't shining when I came in," she said.
"It wasn't shining when I came in, either," I told her. "But it's shining now. (Cue Beetles song)

Of course, it was that moment when our internet decided to crap out so Nikki had to go and fix that. She wanted me to brew some coffee for her this morning, but I confessed that I didn't know how to use the coffee machine. In spite of working in a coffee shop for a year and a half, I still didn't know how to work a coffeemaker. In the end, Nikki had to do it herself.

An hour later, another coworker came in bearing boxes of tea and everyone brewed their own cup. I myself am sitting at the desk sipping Ultra Spice Chai. After a while, the coworker with the tea comes in and asks if anyone wants any candy; she has apple flavored candy and peppermints. I decline the candy but, at her suggestion, I take a peppermint and plunk it into my tea. So now I'm drinking Chai with a hint of peppermint and enjoying the sunshine. It's going to be a great day. :)

P.S. One of my coworkers was telling the story of how she put peppermint into her pineapple tea once and it turned out really well. She didn't think the flavors would go together, but in the end, she's glad she tried it. Now, however, she has to hide her peppermints and her peach and mango tea from her granddaughters because they like to use it all up. Ahhh, kids.