if you were to ask me what i am most grateful for, i useta woulda said my eyes
someone asked Helen Keller if she would rather be deaf or blind (can ya ba-leeve they actually asked her THAT!) and she said, in a blink (no pun intended), she would choose to be blind. she said, “Blindness separates you from ‘things’ and deafness separates you from people.”
i so agree with that as i live in a constant state of battling it out with chemotherapy-induced, bi-lateral, profound hearing loss – deafness really does skip a whole lot of human-interaction information right over my head
i spend a great deal of my energy internally counseling myself that it’s ok if i missed this, that and everything else that i don’t pick up on in the hearing world, especially where human voices enter the picture
being late-deafened has certainly given me a priceless advantage, because i own a 45-yr -old memory bank of all the gross and subtle facets of communication within the english language but, there’s so many things that i just can’t catch (like all the jokes that are shot and dropped out there at such high speed – bummer)
i tell people it’s like playing 3-D SUDAKO all day long, trying to fill in the blanks and beat the clock, while holding back from guessing it wrong and catching up from blowing it – all at the same time
…ANYWAY, what prompted this blog was my realization, this morning, that i had changed my mind about what i am most grateful for
hands down (pun intended), today i declare my hands which happen to have my fingers attached on one end and my arms on the other, get my ‘two thumbs up’ vote
even when i take a nap, i have my vibrating timer tucked into one of my hands and when i’m up and zooming around, i can’t think of one thing that i do that does not require my hands to be serving me
let’s ‘have a hand’ for this lovely day full of the sounds of thunder thundering and fan motors whirring the ac about and, busy hands producing blogs
