A Good Day

Today I took my niece for a walk around the block of the street on which I live. It's roughly a mile in length, but she likes to look at everyone's house, chase after birds, and attempt to touch anything we run across as I say "no". About three quarters of the way through the trip she asked me to carry her, so I sat her on my shoulders and carried her the rest of the way home. She probably weighs about 30 lbs.

It made me think of something that happened nine years ago. A few days before my motorcyle accident I took my car to a mechanic for a repair. I took a backpack full of books and study materials with me in order to get some work done while waiting for the repair to be finished. It turned out that it was going to take the full day for him to get it done so I decided to grab my heavy backpack and walk home. The trip was a few miles, but I made it back without any problem. Incidentally, this was the repair work that led for me to eventually have to take my bike on a ride to get my haircut, which then led to the accident. I describe it briefly here. 

Today I was reminded of my mindset roughly nine years ago when I thought that I would never be able to walk any kind of distance while carrying anything beyond my car keys again. Back then I thought about the day of the car repair as one of the reminders of something that I would never be able to do again. Yet, here I was carrying my niece on my shoulders while walking down the street today, almost exactly nine years after the day that I walked home from the mechanic. I'm so thankful for the physical recovery that I've been allowed, and for the ability to live life regardless of every aftereffect that I've been left to deal with since the accident. It may seem very much trivial, but you have to understand how awful it felt nine years ago to think that my entire physical existence had been inescapably altered. I believe that it's important to take some things in life just one moment at a time and to accept each challenge with a degree of faith, hope, and determination. Overthinking can sometimes lead to absolutely hopeless despair. Things truly have changed for me since the accident, but not nearly as much as I thought they would. I'm thankful.