This is not my usual sort of post and has nothing to do with horses. Tomorrow we will get back to ponies.
As part of the celebration of Dr. Seuss's birthday, my friend Kathy and I went to my old school and read to a couple of classrooms on Friday. We had a lot of fun together and afterward decided to go get lunch before I returned her to her own school.
Kathy was giving me some information I did not need to have as we made our plans and I was a little puzzled. Suddenly, she stopped mid sentence and said, "Oh, my goodness! I forgot you could see!"
We both laughed and then went on making our plans, this time with her remembering that I was sighted and how that affected our plans a bit.
I've been mulling that over in my mind ever since. It reminded me of when Kathy was the 2015 Indiana Teacher of the Year and had just been named one of four finalists for National Teacher of the Year. CBS Evening News sent Chip Reid to Indiana to do a story on her and during that interview, he asked her if there was an advantage to being blind as a teacher.
Listen to what she says:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teacher-who-is-blind-sees-students-for-who-they-really-are/
Did you catch it? Kathy finds that not being sighted is an advantage as she teaches and allows her to better connect with her students. Why? Because she can't see them to judge them.
But there is another lesson that I see, too, one that is meaningful to me right now - how adversity can be a strength.
I've had some health challenges lately, ones that can even pop up suddenly and wipe me out for hours at a time, changing my plans for the day. I've been frustrated, I've felt sick, I've had to back out of doing things that I said I would, and I've even been a little scared once or twice.
I'm doing a lot of thinking on how I can turn my own adversity, as Kathy did, into a positive. Her forgetting that I was sighted helped me realize that I had changed how I perceived myself, with far too much emphasis on the "I don't feel well" aspect. Yes, I have some health challenges, but there is far more to me than that. And looking back, I can see that I have begun to let feeling ill overshadow much of what I do. That is not what I want.
Coming to that realization is a good first step in changing that adversity into a strength.
