You are, indeed, an amazing person! People bandy about terms of God this and church that. But it takes a real man to understand and fictionally attempt to step into another's shoes in the hopes of sharing the same air and linking up to another's feelings. You're one who is quite capable of jumping head first into life itself.
The top eye surgeons at Rice and Baylor insisted I would never see again. A Metrolift bus (for the blind) brought me to the gym I attended. I was doing laps in the pool when I was shocked. I saw enough to feel my way around the stairs but not drive or read. But in a crazy moment I saw words on something. I picked up those "words" which was the corner of a magazine page that had landed in the pool and landed on the bottom. I realized water magnified the print due to my leaky goggles I used to offset pain from chlorine. That instant told me I'd read again with some sort of magnifying instrument.
I'm a crazy researcher and figured a few things more---I decided to have a surgeon do a cataract on my dead eye and other surgery on the other. He was opposed but did it. It restored a significant amount of acuity. He had glasses made up with no prescription in the second eye and a partially corrective lens for the cataract eye. Something moved me to take the glasses and reverse them, holding them backwards over my eyes but the corrective lens now covered the dead eye.
Voila! I could read the chart for both eyes! The surgeon took no money for the surgeries, explaining he's an ophthamologist but also a civil engineer and this was the most unbelievable thing he'd ever seen. I'm not into religion but he was an angel. lol
We both got lucky, I suppose. But in the dozen or so years since, I've come to respect those daring to confront their worst nightmares, prepared to lose if things worked out that way.
Working the stock market was the ultimate challenge for I knew intellectually that one could make money, lots of it. But we've got to be prepared to take the punches along with the prideful moments. Still, the intellectual pursuit coupled with good instinctual responses has enabled me to do well.
I've also learned that only a fool brags about his conquests. Like you, I know we are all here by the greatest bit of good fortune. Nobody gets anywhere alone and it's not distance that has value but finding ourselves not alone. After all, how much is my laughter worth if I'm laughing alone?
Thank you for your eloquent post. As I've said before, you most certainly are a treasure to be enjoyed by us all.
