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发表于 2017-1-10 17:55:51
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There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and
relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're
going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. So, our responsibility
is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to
meet it well. And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that
they're not equipped to adapt. There's an important difference and distinction
between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective
societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. And, truthfully, the only real
and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I
could be described by those definitions.
In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard
truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected
quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in
a wall that will actually disable someone. Perhaps the existing model of only
looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more
disabling to the individual than the pathology itself.
By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their
potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they
might have. We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. So we
need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. And,
most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and
our greatest creative ability. So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these
more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but
instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. So maybe the idea
I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening
ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term,
maybe even dancing with it. And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural,
consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it.
This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150
years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a
truth about the human character. To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the
species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the
one that is most adaptable to change. Conflict is the genesis of creation. From
Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to
survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through
conflict into transformation. So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our
greatest human skill. And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're
made of. Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our
own power. So, we can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as
something more than just tough times. Maybe we can see it as change. Adversity
is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet.
I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this
idea of normalcy. Now, who's normal? There's no normal. There's common, there's
typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person
if they existed? (Laughter) I don't think so. If we can change this paradigm
from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even a
little bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children,
and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the
community.
Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always
required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute.
There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and
those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience
of survival of these people proved of value to the community. They didn't view
these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable.
A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that
red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of
tomatoes. It was summertime: I had shorts on. I hear this guy, his voice behind
me say, "Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins." And I turn around, and it's this
older man. I have no idea who he is.
And I said, "I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting
you."
He said, "Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. I mean, when we met I was
delivering you from your mother's womb." (Laughter) Oh, that guy. And, but of
course, actually, it did click.
This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my
mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived
late for my birthday by two weeks. And so my mother's prenatal physician had
gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my
parents. And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned
in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer
-- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.
He said to me, "I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would
never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have
or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever
since." (Laughter) (Applause)
The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings
throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee,
marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my
college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and
integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann
Medical School and Hershey Medical School. And he called this part of the course
the X Factor, the potential of the human will. No prognosis can account for how
powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. And
Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told
otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices,
a child will achieve."
See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. He understood that there's a
difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. And
there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at
15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I
wouldn't have hesitated for a second. I aspired to that kind of normalcy back
then. But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. And it's because of the
experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with
them. And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to
more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast
shadows on me.
See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own
power, and you're off. If you can hand somebody the key to their own power --
the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for
someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You're
teaching them to open doors for themselves. In fact, the exact meaning of the
word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." It means "to bring forth what
is within, to bring out potential." So again, which potential do we want to
bring out?
There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from
grammar schools to comprehensive schools. It's called the streaming trials. We
call it "tracking" here in the States. It's separating students from A, B, C, D
and so on. And the "A students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers,
etc. Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them
A's, told them they were "A's," told them they were bright, and at the end of
this three-month period, they were performing at A-level.
And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they
took the "A students" and told them they were "D's." And that's what happened at
the end of that three-month period. Those who were still around in school,
besides the people who had dropped out. A crucial part of this case study was
that the teachers were duped too. The teachers didn't know a switch had been
made. They were simply told, "These are the 'A-students,' these are the
'D-students.'" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating
them.
So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit
that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has
our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. If instead,
we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and
others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well.
When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new
ways of being.
I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet
named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is
called "The God Who Only Knows Four Words": "Every child has known God, not the
God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and
keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. Come, dance with me. Come,
dance with me.'"
Thank you. (Applause) |
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