Face the sun

Face the sun

"When you face the sun," wrote Helen Keller, "the shadows always fall

behind you."

This was Helen Keller's poetic way of recommending optimistic

thinking. What you look at and what you face grows in your life. What

you ignore falls behind you. But if you turn and look only at the

shadows, they become your life.

When I was younger I remember hearing other kids tell a joke about

Helen Keller. "Have you heard about the Helen Keller doll?" they

would ask. "You wind it up and it bumps into things."

I've often thought about that joke, and why such a joke about someone

who was deaf and blind was funny. I think the answer lies in our

nervousness about other people overcoming huge misfortunes. (Perhaps

we laugh nervously because we haven't overcome our own small ones.)

In our own day and age, we are quick to consider ourselves victims. We

are all victims of some sort of emotional, social, gender, or racial abuse.

We enjoy taking what difficulties we have had in life and blowing them

up into huge injustices.

Helen Keller didn't complain about being from a dys-functional family,

or of being a woman, or of not being given enough money from the

government to compensate her for her handicaps. She had challenges

most of us can't even imagine, but she refused to become fascinated by

them and make her handicaps her life. She didn't want to focus on the

shadows when there was so much sun.

There is a bumper sticker that I see every so often as I'm driving around:

"Life is a bitch and then you die." I always wonder about that bumper

sticker because it seems illogical. If life is that bad, death should be

welcome. The sticker should say, "Life is a bitch, but the good news is

you die."

British author G.K. Chesterton used to say that pessimists (like the

person with that sticker on his car) don't stay anti-life very long when

you put a revolver to their heads. All of a sudden, they can think of a

million reasons to live. Those million reasons are always there, down

inside of us, waiting to be called up. Our pessimism is usually a false

front put on to get sympathy.

Another popular bumper sticker has been "Shit Happens." I happen to

consider that bumper sticker to be ironically optimistic. It's one of the

qualities of optimists that they are not surprised, overwhelmed, or

offended by trouble. They know that trouble comes, and they know

they can handle it.

Some people have been upset by the popularity of this slogan, and I've

seen them try to counter with the sticker, "Love Happens." Actually,

they have it wrong. Shit does happen. But love does not. Love doesn't

happen all by itself. Love is created.

In his stirring book Son Rise, Barry Neil Kaufman tells an astonishing

true story of how he and his wife healed their once-autistic son and

helped nurture him to a happy, extroverted life. Kaufman and his wife

made a conscious choice to see their son's disability as a great blessing

to them. It was just a choice, like choosing to face the sun instead of

facing your shadows. But as Kaufman says, "The way we choose to see

the world creates the world we see."

I'm reading: Face the sun