Never Walked In High Heels

Living with a disability is the equivalent of being trapped inside the riddle about a dog, a duck, and a bag of grain. Which all need to cross the river? You can’t leave the duck alone with the grain because the duck will eat the grain. You can’t leave the dog with the duck because the dog will eat the duck. Yet somehow you have to manage to take a rowboat and get all three across.

It was on a day when my life was turning out to be the epitome of this riddle when my mother exploded at me “You need to learn to avoid problems at all possible costs! Why can’t you keep things as simple as humanly possible?” The irony of it was I actually do my best to accomplish just that, but I am somehow extremely unsuccessful at it. When you are trying to navigate through a world which is built for people on two functioning legs and with two functioning hands, the idea of avoiding problems leads you little further than coming out your front door. If you want to avoid the challenges of the world, that is staying inside where it’s safe. If you want to live life to the fullest, you better be prepared for some sort of “choose your own adventure” story with lots of opportunities to see the “Game Over” screen.

I used to think that life was actually about avoiding problems at all possible costs, making the right decisions that would lead to the path of least resistance and easy sailing. But you can’t avoid problems. There is no fairy godmother that can swoop in and make everything OK. Living was only in the confines of a highly accessible house and being certain that all the problems in the world will not come to get you will lead to a highly boring life. It’s the old dilemma of Siddartha, the Buddhist prince who had everything he wanted and yet lacked fulfillment in the world. I’m not sure when my mother said I needed to avoid problems, she meant it to its fullest extent possible. Because avoiding problems means on some level that there are real solutions to every dilemma we face, which can be attained. Some issues are so complicated that they are, on a certain level, unsolvable. The best thing we can do is simply work our way through them.

Life only works when its constantly expanding in every direction. This doesn’t simply mean finding creative solutions to the problems that we encounter, or incorporating some sort of community spirit through living. t means that the problems, the sorrows, the bruises, these too are a part of life and worth working through and worth living for. Even this sorrow, which none of us want to encounter, must be faced fully in order for a life to even begin to have the depth possible and necessary to be rich and full of vibrancy. In return, these problems we encounter and sorrows we must mourn present us with a new challenge. We can either close our hearts and become callous, refusing to go anywhere that hasn’t been protected by some emotional health and safety policy. Or we can take it, all of us that is, for what it ,d recognize that to love it all and to live it all is to put yourself out there and be vulnerable, risking failure heartbreak and the entire boat tipping over losing the entire dock and the bag of grain. But in the end, we live in a world where trading vulnerability and safety inevitably stops not only problems, but living, dead in it’s tracks.