World Disability Day has just passed and, as usual, speeches were delivered and promises made. Same as last year, same as the year before. Year after year, World Disability Day is an opportunity for politicians and legislators to make up stories about what they wish they had done, stories about all they want us to believe they have accomplished, stories in which they are the heroes and people with disability are the lucky beneficiaries.
Well, World Disability Day is over now and we are faced with the same grim stories we have always known. Kids with special needs not in school; adults with disability unemployed in rampantly high numbers; public buildings inaccessible; public transport unavailable. But stories aren't the problem.
World Disability Day is over, but disability remains. So let's keep telling stories. Only let's make sure they are good stories. Because good stories make us stronger. They give us hope and courage and a vision of how the world might look if attitudes were different and people were accepted as they are. Good stories remind us of how rich we really are and of how many gifts we have been given — even when we feel poor, even when we feel disabled, even when the abundance the universe has to offer seems to have been given to someone else.
What better story of abundance than the loaves and the fishes? Faced with a hungry, needy crowd, thousands of people who had spent the whole day listening to him teach, Jesus took the only food available — five loaves of bread and two fish — said the blessing and shared it round. Everyone ate as much as they wanted and still there were twelve baskets of scraps. Everyone! Five loaves, two fish, thousands of people, plenty left over!
Sometimes we believe we don't have enough for ourselves, let alone anything to share. Our lives are cramped and crowded — work, illness, debts, anxieties, responsibilities. Toss a disability into the mix and the boat begins to founder and then to sink.
The secret is the point of view, the stories we tell ourselves about the reality of our lives. Told one way, the story of a life with a disability is a burden, a curse, a prison. Told in another, it's a liberation, a discovery, a chance to change all the rules and start from scratch.
How did Jesus manage to feed that crowd of hungry people? Some say he simply multiplied the loaves and the fishes through magic or a miracle. Others think it had more to do with the story he was writing about his life: A story founded on a belief in abundance. His simple, profound faith that all would be fed helped each one present to bring out whatever they had been hiding and share it with those around them.
Because the answer always lies within. Whatever we need, we already have. Abundance is about recognising that truth. Disability challenges our confidence in profound ways. It compels us to look deeper inside ourselves for power and strength and miracles, yet simultaneously enables us to reach out to others on the journey, sharing our weaknesses and transforming them into gifts.
I work in Dehradun with children and young adults with special needs and we have seen this happen again and again with our students, with their parents, with our companions in the field and with the people around us who are drawn in by the excitement and the vividness of the struggle.
Most of us started out feeling helpless and overwhelmed by the fact of disability in our lives. We live in a world which values speed, achievement and strength. Confronted with slowness and vulnerability — in ourselves or our children or our friends — we come to a skidding stop. What? What do you mean she can't walk? How are we supposed to manage with a person who can't see? He can't hear? How can I possibly communicate with him? And then we learn. We discover that there are more ways than one to speak, to understand, to move. There is nothing complacent or ensconced about a life with disability. It's a life cut down to essentials, a life full of tiny moments of triumph and amazement.
Incredible abundance
This year, for World Disability Day and all the years that follow, let's celebrate that abundance. Let's celebrate all the astonishing ways we learn to cope with limitations, all the incredible new pathways we learn to forge in our lives and in our hearts.
Let's change the story. Let's recognise that we are already blessed and fortunate and lucky — right now, just as we are, exactly in this moment.
Here's the new story: We are blessed by our challenges — they help us to grow. We are fortunate in our special needs and our special gifts — they are the resources we will use to change the world. And we are lucky to have been born now, with these particular circumstances, in this particular community.
Turn the page. This story will never end. Abundance!
Published - December 10, 2011 09:13 pm IST
