It Takes One to Know One

Moment to moment, I choose to view this world as harmonious or hostile.  It’s an inside job, this choice I make, independent of the acts of others.  When I maintain harmony WITHIN, I find complimentary energy WITHOUT.  When I choose disharmony, I perceive malice and I behave maliciously.  What I feel, I project; what I project, I attract.

Harmony implies equality, humility and humanness.  In harmony, I forgive others their mistakes as I forgive my own. Harmony equals acceptance.  Disharmony accentuates differences, separating victor from victim, us from them, haves from have nots.  Victims forfeit, then resent power, control and choice.

For me, blindness comes with anger.  Anger at the gods who single me out and anger at people who disrespect me.  As victim, I display the arrogance that my trials are more arduous than yours.  Arrogance borne out of self-pity is the victim’s revolt.  It is reactionary to the nth degree.  It is disharmony of first believing I am less than, then greater than, my fellows.

Back on the street, I realize that when power brokers jostle me, it is my own sense of inadequacy that triggers my resentment. Now a jogger hurdles my white cane and a motorist crowds me in the crosswalk.  How dare they?  I take it personally.  How easily I forget that what others think of me has less to do with me and more to do with them.  Insinuating myself as injured party in their life drama is so egotistical as to be laughable. If I need to inflate my importance, I’ll consult my dog.  Yes, I grumble at the incautious, then dig deep in my harmony bag. Today’s mantra?  Things happen through me not to me.  I am the source rather than the object.  Repeat as needed. 

The Crucible

Blindness is not my biggest problem.  Rather, it is the crucible in which my character defects boil over.  Add blindness to a perfectionist and he becomes immobile.  Add blindness to a victim and he becomes insufferable.  Blindness is the catalyst, not the cause.

For years, I blamed blindness for my shortcomings.  “If I weren’t blind, I’d do this.  If not for blindness, I’d be that.”  It was more convenient to blame than to take responsibility, safer to look outside than inward.  I see now that blindness is an inside job. 

Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% what I make of it.  These proportions have reversed over the years, even as my eyesight dwindled.  Way back when, I thought happiness was proportionate to eyesight.  Now I am less fearful and anxious.  I’m beginning to see what it is to love life. This remarkable change came not from a momentous event.  Rather it came from an invisible change in perception. 

Way back when, I thought blindness was the end of the world.  I was a different person back then.  I still carry some remnants, but I have changed and I am changing.   I can deal with it today.  True, blindness is no Sunday picnic.  But I don’t need to lug around twenty-seven years of baggage.

A crucible is a vessel in which elements change when heated.  It symbolizes trial by fire.  My crucible now contains patience, tolerance and acceptance, perhaps in relatively small proportions, but they are present nonetheless.   

To a wise friend, I expressed dismay that it had taken me so long to wise up, to come to terms with blindness.  She said, “Perhaps your difficulty was more with life and less with blindness.”

“Hmmm.  I think I’m beginning to see the light

Life is Hard

Things were easier when I had my eyesight.  Walking down Ashland Avenue, crossing at the light, strolling into the Swedish bakery, eyeing the breads, the cookies, the cakes.  Signaling for the counter girl and pointing to that one, no, that one right there, that’s the one.  Sometimes I want to stay home today because going out and going through all this effort seems like too much work, too much fear.  But when I put forth the effort, a lot of times the payoff is even greater than it was back then.  The reward is more generous, the breads and cakes much sweeter. 

 Here’s a story Annie Dillard tells in her book, The Writing Life:

Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment.  Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles: bad and good.  Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad pile.  At length he turned to the young man.  “You submit this same landscape every year and every year I put it on the bad stack.  Why do you like it so much?”

The young photographer said, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”

Blindness is an Olympic event: the movements remain the same; the degree of difficulty increases.  My trip to the Swedish Bakery requires minimal exertion.  But the concentration is exhausting.  Every trip is an adventure.  It’s effort versus payoff, risk versus reward.  And, aside from really great donuts, the reward is intrinsic.  It’s the sense of accomplishment.  Fear is a daunting foe.  Some days I need to push myself.  I don’t want to stay relegated to the sidelines, to the life of what might have been.  

Play Ball!

It’s baseball season!  This season’s first pitch was delivered by a Beep Ball enthusiast.  “We’re forming a team,” he told me.  “Want to join?”

“No, but thanks for asking,” I replied.  “Seems I spend half my life bent double at the waist, feeling the ground for what I need but can’t see.  What makes you think I want to make a game out of that?”

“But the ball beeps,” he persisted.

“So does a garbage truck backing up and I avoid that too,” I said.

“Oh, you’re no fun,” he said and walked away, or at least I think he did.  I felt alone, which reminded me of golf.

I once joined the Blind Golfers Association.  Walking home from the thrift shop with my new, gently used golf clubs, my neighbor-turned-heckler shouted, “You must have one heck of a slice.  The eighteenth fairway is four miles east of here.”  I never got the chance to prove him wrong because I never found a sighted golfer to pair with and I donated the clubs back to the thrift shop.

Maybe I’m fated not to return to the playing field. I have my own take on spectator sports.  I’ll just harness Randy and hike over to Wrigley Field.  We’ll hang outside the ivy walls along with determined and desperate Cubs fans.  The view’s not so great from Sheffield Avenue but my old transistor radio describes the action just fine.  And I might not circle the basepath like I once did but I can walk eighty blocks round trip between home and Wrigley.  And I might watch baseball with my eyes closed but I know for a fact that, on that close play at second, the ump missed the call.  That’s not everyman’s version of fantasy baseball but it works for me.

Have you read our other blog?

Second Sense publishes another blog, Second Opinions, in which staff and volunteers write on a wide range of topics from guide dogs to the advantages of dating someone with vision loss.  Check it out here: http://secondopinionsblog.second-sense.org/ 

On Being a Nuisance

My sculptor friend from Nova Scotia put it this way: “Airline travel in Canada is pleasant.  In the States, I feel like I’m a nuisance.”  If a sighted, exquisitely independent Canadian feels like a nuisance, where does that leave me?  I like to feel that my need for a little extra help does not make me a nuisance.  And if I feel I’m being treated as such, I try not to internalize it.  Blindness itself is a nuisance.  I don’t need any extra baggage.

Randy requires accommodation, but I don’t consider him a nuisance.  I simply nod and smile at questions like, “You mean that dog gets to ride in the cabin too?”  But when a fellow traveler tries to pass off Frisky their pet ferret as a bona fide service animal, I get riled.  I understand how people with disabilities come to be viewed with cynicism and distrust, like we’re all out to beat the system.  Our needs become degraded to the level of the scammers, for whom each whim becomes an entitlement.

George said it best.  George was the O’Hare skycap who escorted me from gate to curb.  While we talked sports, George admonished travelers who blocked our path or distracted Randy from his work.  “Some people got no respect,” said George.

Travel is stressful.  So I practice patience and tolerance.  I respect rules and regulations.  I don’t blame the T.S.A. for making me get half-undressed at Security, nor to have my methodically packed stuff spread among nine plastic bins.  Measures seem extreme, but then so are folks who blow up planes to make their point. 

A little help and consideration get Randy and me safely home.  And we’re grateful for that help, for those who came before, those for whom being treated like a nuisance was a call for change.

Sandalwood Marinade

Caution: The following post contains strong language. 

Nobody warned me about the hazards of a writing fellowship.  Consequently, I contracted a painful case of “Writer’s Neck.”  While colleagues insisted suffering breeds creativity, I sought relief from Ms. V, the Main Street masseuse.  Talk about relief!  My Vermont muscle-rubber kneaded me like sourdough.

Stretched out on the slab and slathered in sandalwood oil, I submitted to Ms. V.  Randy shed vicarious muscle tension and fell to dozing.  Gas Music from Venus wafted from the digital boom box.  Then the sandalwood oil bottle hit the floor.  Randy retrieved.  “Good boy,” said Ms. V.

But in Randy, the scent and taste had triggered the call of the wild.  He licked the oil off my foot.  He licked the floor where the bottle fell.  “There’s nothing there,” said Ms. V.

“That won’t stop him,” I said.  “Not once he’s got the taste.”

“But there’s nothing there,” repeated Ms. V.

“I hope you’re right,” I said.  “I’ve borne witness to Randy’s gastrointestinal misadventures and they rival Vesuvius.”  Randy licked my other foot.  I shooed him away.

“Don’t worry,” said Ms. V.  “Those slurping noises are just from the little bit in his mouth.  Oil doesn’t dissolve, you know.  It lingers.  He’ll be OK.”

I formed my response carefully.  Too strident was whining.  Too casual was ineffectual.  I said, “He’ll shit like a goose.”

The phrase hung like a southbound gander, then plopped to the floor along with the sandalwood oil bottle.  “Oops, slippery” said Ms. V, then hastily added, “Don’t worry.  Nothing spilled.  Everything’s all right.”

Hours later now, I’m hunched over my keyboard, undoing all the good work of Ms. V.   Randy is sacked out.  He twitches in sleep. Chasing rabbits by the river? Closing on that solitary gander winging south?  Someone’s stomach rumbles.  I massage my writer’s neck.  The skin is slick, the scent is sandalwood.