Читать книгу Becoming a Counselor - Samuel Gladding T., Samuel T. Gladding - Страница 17

I knew better. And I knew that I knew better. And my friends knew that I knew better. But there I was on top of the horse stables—30 feet up above the ivy down below with my friend Carl Jones saying, “If you want in the club, jump.”

Being 10 at the time, I wanted in the club (whose name I have now forgotten). And so, looking straight ahead, I sprang from the roof like I was diving from a platform in the Olympics and flew gracefully for a millisecond. Then I landed with a thud and with considerable pain. Most of my body was fine. However, below my right elbow was a rock that simply obeyed the laws of physics and homeostasis. In other words, it did not move, and when my elbow came crashing down on it, the hypothesis that bones are not as hard as granite was proven once again. My elbow, though pointed, did not break through the granite. Instead, it was shattered, and so was my hope of landing on my feet, metaphorically or literally.

At first the grown-ups who examined my injury thought I had a sprain or a bruise, even Carl’s dad, who was a doctor (an allergy specialist). The long and short of the story is that the elbow was never set properly, and I lost full rotation in it. After the accident, I found it difficult to eat with my right hand. Therefore, I switched and became more ambidextrous by using my left hand to hold my fork or spoon. I already was a lefty when batting in baseball.

The mobility I lost in one hand (or should I say arm?) gave me new agility in the other. I wish I had not had the accident and did not still carry some physical pain in my right elbow. Sometimes the breaks we get in life are not the ones we want. Yet they can lead us to become more flexible and remind us never to foolishly leap or seek after the superficial.