Don’t Take Anything for Granted
What you can do one day might be gone the next.
I was lying here on the couch, relaxing on a Sunday, watching the Rockies game. It’s what I do almost all the time on Sundays when it’s baseball season. Our third baseman missed the ball as it went from the shadows to the sunlight and the batter was able to reach first. The announcer made the comment like, “we’re just so used to the end result, we’re not used to him missing that play.” This was true, it has been a play that has become routine. A friend just a few moments ago made a comment on Facebook that we should all think of the things we are able to do as well as the things we are not. This made me think of the fact that this friend of mine is a very good artist, and I’m totally blind. There are blind artists, people who can draw in strangely real ways. I am not one of those artists though.
So I wrote on my friend’s page about how great she is at drawing and that she should see my drawings, they suck! I was told I’d be good in an abstract drawing contest. Well, ok, if the burger-flipping career goes out the window, I’ve got a fallback. But then I remembered the most extreme cases of the saying, “Be thankful for what you have for it may soon be gone,” or whatever the quote is. I thought about my dear late wife Priscilla Carlson. In Nov. 2011, she had a stroke, resulting from falling out of her wheelchair and breaking 8 bones in her legs. She was born with brittle bones, a disorder that was only 10 years old so far as the medical journals were concerned at the time of her birth. Anyway, this stroke, on the left side, caused her to have to re-learn how to speak, write, and read. Her short-term memory was affected as was her cognition. If people talked too fast, her brain couldn’t keep up, if there were too many noises, she would get overwhelmed and said it felt like a hot poker was being shoved into her head. But the one thing she never got over was the thing that I am doing right this very second.
I’m writing this post. I had this flash of inspiration. I thought of Priscilla saying to me on more than one occasion: “I used to just whip things out, I just wrote like it didn’t matter, wrote scholarship essays in 20 minutes and handed them in. Now it takes me 20 minutes to write a sentence.” All told, this post has taken me 10 minutes.
Dave Bahr is the founder of In-Sightful living. He works as an advocate for persons with disabilities and a usability specialist. Schedule a Call with Dave here.