Spirit Fire

by Donna Mitchell-Moniak

Someone has to cut my food now. And usually button my shirt. My cane is becoming not substantial enough for getting around outside of the house. Dressing myself is a labor. But there is something so positive about being handicapped. It cultivates being.

Maybe I say that because my spiritual life is pretty well established. Meditation, contemplation, and a metaphysical understanding and world view certainly do keep things in a particular framework. It is one where challenges are opportunities and the wisdom of the soul gives us just what we can handle. The framework holds me in goodness, in being able to see what has been adjusted within me as a result of no options. That tells me how silly I was in not changing certain factors about myself in an easier way, but c’est la vie!

Additionally, being handicapped means that one experiences many things differently from those without these issues. Like being pregnant, you start to see others who share in disability. I notice how many people are tired and could just use a chair or bench at the service counter of a store, or at the long line of the post office, or along the endless expanse of floor to be crossed at the cinema. I notice how many people have canes, walkers, wheelchairs, limps, prostheses, or whose speech has been changed due to stroke, MS, or various other reasons. I watch how those in a rush, stressed out and self-consumed, don’t hold doors for those less strong, almost knock over someone who literally can’t get out of their way quickly, and don’t realize how dangerous that interaction just was. These kinds of experiences don’t increase anger in me. Instead they increase compassion. How did we get like this? Why is it rarer to help than to have a negative comment?

Likewise, so often I see patience in the eyes of the disabled. Life doesn’t have to be so fast. We don’t have to feed the monster of stress and anxiety. We can all ‘slow down just a little.’ Likewise, humor is often on the face of the handicapped. Just as often there is pain and frustration and futility. Yet the humor is in the over-the-top-ness of almost everything in this country! One needs to be Hercules to open a can of cat food! Or rip open a protein bar. Packaging within packaging, tamper-proof everything makes almost anything more than an egg un-openable. I love it when my husband struggles with the jelly jar because then it’s not me! Handicap aside, our generation is getting older and our parents are … already old. Does everything have to wrapped up like Fort Knox? That’s a joke since money isn’t even kept there anymore!

Back to being. For me this journey has also illumined all the ways that each us might be handicapped; not physically but by our habits, tendencies, beliefs, recurring thoughts, and the like. What is Being for each person? I know what it has developed into for me, but how about for others? Or will it look and smell the same for everyone? Being handicapped has showed me evermore how unique and divinely special each person is, and that through various adversities, people by nature survive and grow. And the majority come out the other side smiling, with greater understanding and well-being. Life is a great mystery. Being and doing are inextricably linked. Less able to do, or needing to be creative or dismissive in that regard, being was given room to increase. Patience, humor, letting go, trusting others and more have come with this journey. How is your journey going?