Handicapped

While grocery shopping this past weekend, I had the pleasure of being served by a young girl who was the bagger for my groceries.  She clearly had some condition—hard to say if it was on the autism spectrum or some other diagnosis—but she was incredibly sweet, friendly, accommodating, and she did a great job bagging my groceries.  I am sure she did not view herself as handicapped, and it occurred to me that because she did not view herself as handicapped, she wasn’t. It dawned on me that we are all handicapped and we are all not handicapped.

Being “handicapped” is the human condition, otherwise known as imperfection, fallibility, bearing the burden of original sin.  In biblical terms, we are banished from the Garden of Eden.  I do not mean to diminish the severity of those with very serious handicaps versus those who, by all appearances, are not handicapped at all.  What I mean is being handicapped or not is not a dichotomy, whereby we fall on either side of a dividing line.  It is rather a spectrum, a continuum with all of us falling somewhere on that linear progression from mildly handicapped to severely handicapped, and our perspective determines where we believe we fall on that continuum, much as it does for our degrees of happiness.

It is always a tremendous inspiration when we see people with very severe handicaps doing things you would never expect them to do.  We watch Iraqi war veterans who have lost limbs playing basketball; we delight in the Special Olympics and realize the efforts of those participants are as meaningful, if not more so, than those in the traditional Olympics.  At the same time, we all know people who are not “handicapped” and who are not nearly as active or motivated as many of those who are.  We all know slackers who pride themselves in how little they do and seek to get away with whatever they can. They are not “handicapped” or are they? If you think about it, being handicapped is much like being happy, in that it often comes down to perspective.  If we regard ourselves as disadvantaged we will likely stay that way, because we are focused on our weaknesses rather than our strengths.  If, however, we are focused on our strengths, our weaknesses—our “handicaps”–disappear from our radar.

Of course, there are things the girl at the grocery store cannot do or cannot do well, but so what.  There are many things I cannot do or do well.  I don’t do them, primarily for that reason.  She might only be capable of bagging groceries, but she was rejoicing in the task and performed it as if it were as meaningful as brain surgery to a brain surgeon.  And that is the point.  She was happy; she was productive; she was proud; she was beautiful.

There are those in our culture who have talents we deem important, like throwing a football or looking beautiful through the lens of a camera, but those same people have their own handicaps, though we might not call them by that label.  They might have emotional issues or ego problems to the point where they cannot have normal relationships.  There are a whole host of “handicaps” that can lead to emotional, spiritual, psychological struggles that belie any appearance of physical prowess or make-up.  Or it might be as simple as unhappiness—what greater handicap is there than depression, clinical or not.

All those we see doing things we expect them to be unable to do, adjusting their lives to make the best of what they have—the lesson is not simply in overcoming a handicap.  The lesson is in moving along that handicap spectrum I referred to.  We are all handicapped in one way or another.  It is up to us to determine where on that spectrum—from the less severe handicap to the most severe—we will fall.  I submit that the bagger of my groceries, because of her happiness at the task and her finding a task that gave her the fulfillment she seemed to embrace, was much less handicapped than, for example, the basketball star who can’t find a meaningful relationship, because he is full of himself.

Handicapped