November 23, 2010

I am almost too tired to do this, although it has been a momentous day, more than worth writing about. My mind has dissipated to the level of playing Freecell for an hour, knowing I want to write and that have lots to do and respond to. I am just tired – in a very satisfied and somewhat overwhelmed way.

Sometimes – tonight – I imagine myself when I was 30 or 45 years younger and try to figure out if I could have ever predicted my life as it is now from the perspective of those days. I was with Mike at supper. He is 36 years younger than I am (as I often remind him!) and I was losing myself in a reverie about IF I could have believed then that today COULD even happen.

Some things are clearly enough in a line to have been comprehensible. Four walls, table cloths, stuff like that. But much beyond this mind numbing simplicity and clearly my life has leapt into so many dimensions that the child and young adult Judith had no imagination of. A simple example – I have many ceramics – very beautiful pieces – given to me by the artists who made them, and more than one each! I could not have permitted myself at 25 to imagine that I would have such friends. That I myself would be an artist was certainly not in my purview.

Tonight Mike, his friend Kevin and I presented a potential WPIT project to a class of young students who are learning to design and develop video games. The idea is to create a series of video games that require the players to build inclusive solutions to the games’ problems. Without getting into details (perhaps in the near future!) we were met with focussed interest and enthusiasm. Some twenty students and the teacher signed up to find out more and to start designing and writing the required code.

When I was twenty-five I had spent a summer coding data onto charts printed on legal sized paper so key punch typists could create the cards that fed an apartment-sized computer.

Three professors had at that same time showed off to me their personal computers and proudly demonstrated how to play Pac Man.

I understood Inclusion to mean that I should be fighting for the right to share an apartment with someone who had quadriplegia and with whom I had no particular relationship. In this apartment and ONLY in this apartment I would be able to get six hours a day of personal assistance given to me by someone I did not hire who was trained by someone else to “take care” of me. It was the best I could hope for at 25.

I understood that I was lucky to hope that someday I would be employed by some corporation to do something like HR work. I had been told by knowledgeable professionals that I would not live past thirty and that I would have few if any friends.

Tonight Mike and I were talking about a certain quiet feeling, almost like a let down, that one can have after a very successful event. In this case we are having the kind of experience that hard work, good luck and a really good idea are coming together. In one sense it should be perfectly obvious that such a thing as Inclusive video games can be created. On the other hand I think we both know that this evening and this project could easily go the other way.

I said to Mike that I recognize that quiet feeling as being different from enthusiasm. For me, it is about passion and gratitude. Enthusiasm is a cheap high that easily dissipates when circumstances change or even when it’s just the next morning. Passion is a long term energy and one is very fortunate indeed to be able to live inside the space of one’s own passion.

And this is where gratitude comes in, at least for me. I am deeply moved that my life has been given so many opportunities to extend beyond anything I could or still can imagine. Not only am I someone who gets to do what I love to do; I am also someone who is blessed with unique surprises that take me well beyond the kind of life I would have created for myself if it were all left up to me.

Call it God or call it whatever makes sense to you. My life is clearly in the hands of a power greater than myself and in my opinion that is a very good thing!