Time and Disability

There is regular time and then there is disability time. Some people have known them both in a single life. Others marry into knowing the difference or they have children and in turn must learn about the matter. However you get there once you’ve felt the distinction you’re never the same.

Regular time is causality or the illusion of causality. The story of a human life can be told in terms of an equation: A, A1, B,C,D, unto E. Where E equals a wise old woman and A is the moment of her birth. A sequence of events produced E. E is summary. We all know this story–art and literature depend upon causality and its proprioceptive incorporation of time. A life well spent is a planned life. An hour is a planned hour. If causality had a saint it would be Benjamin Franklin.

Disability time is without observable connections. For the sake of argument I’ll say that disability time is like Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity. There’s a chance aspect to events. We call this “coincidence” and yet Jung saw that the ancient Chinese were able to understand how chance events offer meanings to each and every moment of observation. In his famous introduction to the I Ching Jung wrote:

“The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavour our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation…synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.”

You are here now. You did not plan to arrive here. Nothing you did or did not do has created this instant. What you will “do” with this instant is in turn the process by which meaning will be discovered.

This is disability time. You can’t put it on a calendar. It can’t be scheduled for scrutiny or convenience. It will manifest itself with all its manifold meanings in the chance operations of nature and that’s that. Early to bed, early to rise–nah, it won’t save you. “Kairos” was a winged god whose name meant “Lucky Coincidence” to the Greeks. And the Greeks understood that when Kairos appeared you had better grab ahold of him quickly. This quickness is what makes people with disabilities so successful. For while the blind goddess Fortuna may drag a good person into the underworld without a second’s meditation, lucky coincidence is just as prevalent in the many worlds around us.

This is a short meditation on disability and success.

S.K. 

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto