DISABITILITIES SHOULD NOT STOP YOU FROM REACHING THE TOP

"Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face." This was Helen Keller’s advice to a five-year-old blind child in 1932. It can as well be regarded as a summary of Helen’s approach to life. Helen Keller was possibly the most remarkable person ever to grace this planet. Born in 1880 she was left deaf and blind as a result of a childhood illness at the age of 19 months. Nevertheless, Helen became an articulate spokesperson for the dignity of all individuals. She fully explored all her potentials to touch lives around her. She provided solution where there were difficulties. She never subdued her potentials under the weight of physical challenges and disabilities.

She realised early in life that her potentials were not mere substance but rather that they were great ideas which convey possibility status on all things around her. Helen Keller was once quoted as saying that “When your heart and mind can look into the past, into your reserve of memory, select its most choice ideas from it and project it into the future, then you have begun the journey of exploring your potential”. Exploring your potentials will require the full participation of your heart and your mind. It would require you to cast your mind back and project into the future. It would require you to make choices- valuable and well informed choices.

Will you be rich or poor, well-educated or ignorant, loved or abandoned, alive with a new intensity and purpose or merely drifting upon the tide of circumstances, these are clear choices that depend only on your inner clarity about who you are and what you want your life to mean, both to yourself and all those who will come to know you. All men and women dream but only some have the courage of their convictions. Most, through default, float upon the sea of mediocrity, responding to biological and social needs but creating nothing new, ennobling, or in some measure liberating. Helen Keller was deaf and blind, yet she chose to make a difference. She espoused greatness and success; she did not wallow in mediocrity, neither did she succumb to the frailties of natural disabilities.

Many, unfortunately, are capable of going through their days without entertaining a single original idea, content with acquiescing to the propaganda of vested interests. A few, however, think about their potential and what they can do to explore and expand it. These are the ones who push the race forward, stretching the limits of consciousness further into the realm of new possibilities. You cannot succeed in anything alone. Your success is a wave that carries others, inviting them to examine their own potentiality. You vibrate at a higher frequency when you choose excellence; you influence others with your presence alone. The urge to be more than you are right now, to express a nobler speech, a finer mind, a more uplifting outlook, a larger reach of resources is the urge of life itself to explore its dimensions.

Helen Keller’s advice to that five year-old blind child in 1932 is still relevant to everybody today; in spite of all adversities, “Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.” Reject mediocrity, aim only for the best!