Helen Keller, the legend from Alabama, USA lived in a world of darkness and silence ever since a strange sickness afflicted her at nineteen months and robbed her eyesight and hearing. Yet she brought hope to millions of people with infirmity around the world due to her philosophy of “A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make a turn”. For a child with no knowledge of written language and only a hazy recollection of spoken language, she made her successful turnaround to understand the world at the age of seven, with the help of her teacher Anne Sullivan. The breakthrough came when Helen made the connection that the spelling w-a-t-e-r Sullivan wrote on her palms meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing in her hand. Once words became alive for her, the world became sunny. Despite being hearing and sight-impaired, she graduated from college and became an activist for the differently abled people.
Our life on earth is certainly a winding road with many bends, some subtle and others sharp with ugly bumps, slope, and potholes. But there is always the stream of joy running alongside the bending path in the form of true love, friendship, faith, career and so on. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus puts it succinctly ‘the only constant in life is Change’ and a wider expanse always awaits at the bend. John Furnis of Washington state was known as the Blind Woodsman. He lost his eyesight and sense of smell at the age of 16, encountered the bends of anxiety and depression to the point of ending it all, yet with family support he navigated superb. In blind school he learnt woodwork, though at first the idea seemed ridiculous to him. Once his skills with the wood sharpened, he started enjoying his work. Then he set his ‘sights’ on the piano school for blind - as he puts it, working on piano is nothing but fine-tuned woodwork. Fate brought him close to a girl who came to paint the pianos, and eventually they found marital bliss in each other. Life, indeed, is the proverbial river to be negotiated by following its bends.