Blindness

Tonight I finished reading Erik Weihenmayer's autobiography.  Here are some of my favorite things he said...

This is right after he finds out his mom just died in a car accident.  He had already completely lost his sight as a teenager and was finally starting to feel like he could succeed as a blind person.  As a side note, I'm not a believer that God is the one who sits in heaven pulling strings and placing struggles in our lives.  But I still love the realization he comes to here...

"Maybe life is a perpetual series of losses.  If there was a God, he must enjoy putting humans through a great cruel punishment...which forces us to scramble and find ways of living with less.  God kills off a vital piece of our lives, one that we thought was most important, we scramble to make due with less, and then he takes that away too."  (Then a bit later he has says this)  "Yeah, he (God) takes things away...but he gives other things back and, in a strange way, those new things can be just as good or even better.  I think you just have to look for the new things a little harder."


This was something a camp counselor at a summer camp said to him.  I felt like I could relate to having a demon.  While not blindness, I have other things waging wars inside of me.  This is fantastic advice.

"For some of you, blindness is still a demon, waging a war inside you, but if you can accept blindness for what it is, and lay it to rest, if you give it a place and make it a part of you, like having brown hair or green eyes, or being tall or short, then the demon will wither away and it will die"


More good stuff...

"For me, the fear of climbing blind does not come when I am hanging securely from a fat hold or after latching on to the next.  The greatest fear is in the reaching, at that moment when I have committed my body and soul to finding the next hold, when I am hoping, predicting, praying I will find what I am seeking."

"After 16 years of blindness, one thing I've learned is that life is never meant to be easy; exciting, challenging maybe, rewarding from time to time, but never easy.  Ironically when I finally accepted this reality, that's when life got easy."

"There are moments in our lives when we can move forward in small increments, increasing the challenge bit by bit, but there are other times when security is merely an illusion, when we must summon our courage, gather up our past skill, and proceed by the power of sheer faith."

"Somewhere along the way, you may lose something you thought was important, but everything you need to fulfill you is inside you or right in front of your eyes.  You just have to reach.  It won't often be easy...but it will always be a great adventure."