Humility and Life Lessons

Our entire family spent last weekend at the Nebraska Center for the Education of Children Who are Blind and Visually Impaired's family weekend. It is a yearly gig that we partake in, well worth the time in gold. As always, we get to meet up with the families that have grown near and dear to us. As always, we get to see Sally Gittiinger, the superintendent of NCECBVI, who never fails to inspire and amaze us with her love for her career. As always, we come home with more than one revelation and life lesson to tuck in our heads and our hearts. The picture here is of Bill at Orientation and Mobility Training. (With the Kleenex under his shades, kind of looks like a Freddy Krueger wanna be, don't you think?)

This year, the lesson came on Friday night via a game of Beep Ball. Parents vs. kids.

Beep ball is a game for the blind that is like a baseball of sorts. The softball beeps, for reasons which I hope are obvious. Really good players utilize a pitcher, just like baseball. We remedial players, of course, utilized a tee. There are two foam pylons placed respectively where the first and third bases for standard baseball are placed. They are both connected to a remote, held by a neutral player who stands behind the batter. When the batter hits the ball, the remote-holder randomly chooses to activate either the base at third or at first, at which point it makes a noise that is slightly different than the noise that the ball is making. The object is for the batter to reach the base before the outfielders retrieve the beeping ball. If he/she does, their team scores a point; if not, they are out. Three outs, end of inning.

Simple enough, I thought. However, to make all things equal, we parents wore blindfolds.

The kids smoked us. Flattened us. Beat us to a pulp. I don't think they really even had to try.

And within about 30 seconds of donning the blindfold, I realized that our children are darn amazing to adapt to the sighted world that we live in....and it doesn't even seem to phase them....as evidenced by the score. I realized very quickly that as sighted individuals, we are extremely quick to judge those who are blind or visually impaired. Somehow, we see people who don't see very well as less capable. We count them out. We assume they can't do things just because they cannot see like we do. We fail to realize that they are remarkable for living in a world that is made for people who do see well. It only took 30 seconds of me wearing a blindfold to realize this, because in less time than that, I was completely disoriented. I had difficulty finding the darn beeping ball, not to mention the giant beeping bases that are impossible to miss visually. I was stumbling around dragging my feet because I had no idea where I was or where I was going. And....being totally out of our element, all of the parents on our team cheated in between each batter, peeking out from under our blindfolds to figure out where we were....and it was usually about 50 feet away from where we thought we were and facing the opposite direction. Talk about humbling.

I will now take the opportunity to point out that you will never find a person who is blind and has lived and honed his or her skills even close to as disoriented and unsure of themselves as we were in those moments.

I challenge you, dare you, to put on a blindfold and walk around without peeking for 30 minutes. In the comfort of your home is one thing. I bet you can't do it in a place you've never been before.

But if you do, it will change the way you look at things.