Diligent Beauty

I was in a store the other day and I saw a young lady diligently working on a manual task behind the counter.  She handed me my change and it was then that I noticed she had nail polish on.  The interesting part was that she only had a thumb.  The remaining fingers were gone, the apparent result of a birth defect.  What struck me about this was two things.  First, she was still using that stump to function with a complicated manual task assembling something behind the counter that required two hands.  Second, was that she considered her hand pretty and important enough to warrant pink nail polish on her remaining fingernail.  She gave me my change with a brillant smile that showed how truly beautiful she was.

We often focus on our shortcomings to our detriment.  We tell ourselves we are limited and can’t do things because of our handicaps, our lack of skill, our deficient education, or whatever setbacks stand in front of us.  We quit.  We also stop thinking “outside the box” to solve problems and we most often lose the incentive to put in the extra effort to succeed in spite of our handicap.  I’ve noticed since the passage of the American’s With Disabilities Act that it is more common to file lawsuits over perceived failures to comply, than it is to find ways to function in a less than perfect environment.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t comply with reasonable accommodation and the outline of the laws regarding handicaps, but sometimes this whole thing gets silly.

I recently encountered a complaint that adequate Braille labeling had not been put up to allow someone to differentiate one appliance from another in a public facility.  If I shut my eyes and turned on the machine I could instantly tell what it was, so it set me to thinking…do we have to label the coffee pot, the towel dispenser, the toilet as to their function in Braille.  It gets pretty ridiculous if you let your mind wander.  (We had a fully sighted employee years ago who liked to label stuff, like “tool box” “manuals” and the like.  One other rather snarky employee who was annoyed by it came in one day and decided to label the countertop “countertop” and even labeled the floor as the “floor.”)

So, back to the girl with the smile.  She could have easily said, “I need special accommodation and someone else will have to do this task.”  She didn’t.  She learned how to adapt to the situation successfully.  How often do we adapt to our handicapped life situations?  Whether they be physical or emotional we are always challenged to make the effort and not sink back into that dark place where we expect others to always do for us.