Learning the hard way

By Dan Nied [send email]

Last week was turbulent and shameful.

There was a lesson learned ... well, at least taught. Only time will tell if I have learned anything from it. For now, it is there, and I shall pass it on to you before it leaves me.

Wednesday I went to visit a friend at a Denver Hospital. In February, she was in a horrific car accident and broke several bones in her neck. Luckily, her spinal cord was not severed. While I was there I sat in on a class she was taking at the hospital for the newly disabled. It was about how to get around in a wheelchair, and general things that a disabled person would need to know. The five students in the class wheeled in one by one.

There was Tom, the middle-aged man with a smile, but no voice. Susan, about Tom's age. She was the optimist who I spied crying in the hallway shortly after the class. Then there was Anu, a woman from Arizona who was the loudmouth of the group. And then there was my friend, who may have years of physical therapy as her best-case scenario.

But then my jaw nearly dropped as a boy wheeled in with what seemed to be his mother. We'll call him Jake. Jake was so young, so strong. It turns out he was 17. In March, he was in a car accident that claimed the life of his father and left him with a severed spinal cord, and no chance of recovery.

That chair was Jake's home for the next 60 years or so. Physically, he was robbed of his 20s like a liquor store cashier. Mentally, the anguish might be worse - burying a father and losing physical abilities at the same time probably isn't the easiest thing to go through.

When I was 17, I was contemplating a walk-on attempt for the Bowling Green football team the next year. I wasn't trying to figure out how I would live my life.

So that was Wednesday. It was a very contemplative day.

But then Thursday rolled around. For whatever reason, Thursday was a selfish day. It was a day where I magnified my problems 100 times in my head and expected the world to feel sorry for me. It was a day of short tempers and obnoxious comments, fueled by my own immaturities.

My Thursday ended with a professional argument that really was anything but professional. As most arguments are, it was heated and could have been avoided.

Immediately, I realized I made a mistake. I agonized over it until 3 a.m. I replayed it in my mind like a prizefight, reviewed my good lines, my bad points and my overall performance. Was I wrong? Was I right? Why is so much going wrong right now?

But then something popped into my head.

It was Jake. I was embarrassed.

Sparky Anderson, former manager of the Cincinnati Reds and the Detroit Tigers once said he watched the local news every night because no matter how bad his life was, there was always someone on there who has it worse.

I realized that my mother was right all those years ago. There are people starving in Africa, there are people who sleep on the street through no fault of their own. There are people who are blind, deaf, mute, mourning, struggling, straining, yelling, crying, dying.

There is Jake.

And I was ashamed.

So I took a deep breath and looked around my apartment and thought about my steady job and how good I have it. Maybe it's not all perfect, but I have control, and that is more than anyone can ask for.

That was my lesson.