I was thinking – I haven’t done any challenges for a while. I don’t really like blog challenges with daily prompts (for me, anyway). I never feel like I’m being remotely creative or writing anything worthwhile. Instead of looking for a challenge this time, I came up with my own.
I’m am going to write 30 posts for the next 30 days about 30 things I take for granted.
I don’t mean your run-of-the-mill, “I take my friends and how wonderful they are for granted too much.”
I intend to write about different aspects of my life that have influenced me in ways many of my acquaintances have never been influenced. I imagine as time passes this will get harder and harder, but maybe not. I can definitely think of a few possibilities already.
The first thing I take for granted:
I have an uncle in a wheelchair. He is paralyzed from the waist down and has been ever since I can remember. I’ve seen photos of the year I was born in which he is standing. It looks so odd to me. I have no memories of him before he was confined to a wheelchair.
I love my uncle. It sucks that for more than 20 years he’s been stuck in that chair.
He lost the use of his legs after he fell asleep while driving his motorcycle and crashed. He was airlifted to the Mayo Clinic, which is probably one of the reasons he’s alive today. My dad told me he and his family were told to say their goodbyes. That at any minute my uncle could die. Yet somehow he pulled through.
I didn’t experience any of that trauma. The only thing I experienced was having an uncle in a wheel chair, but it occurred to me the other day that a lot of people don’t grow up with a family member or close friend with a major physical handicap. Presumably, then, a lot of people actually see those individuals that do have physical handicaps as very different. I don’t.
What I take for granted is that growing up around a physically handicapped person made me see physically handicapped people as just people. I can’t say I don’t notice handicaps – I do, but much in the way I notice skin color or gender as just a single characteristic, not a defining one. Thus I might describe someone using their skin color, gender or hair color, but would not try to define who they are using those same characteristics.
What kind of things do you take for granted?
amandatheatheist 