I've been hearing from SCI friends recently about how their lives are different from before. How they've ended up in careers that they didn't choose. How they've found themselves in places they'd never imagined. How they never wanted to follow this path. I don't really feel that way.
In searching for quotes to go with my crossroads title, I came across this by Sol Luckman: "I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be."
It echoes what I feel: life is random and unstable. I've not exactly followed a traditional or linear career path (merchant banking to medical women to millennium to toyshop via Latin American MAs, books and arts funding). I've gone where my interest has taken me. So my current destination, as a hospital governor, fundraiser and writer amongst other things, is not much of a surprise. As all of us, I am many things. I love the way Walt Whitman puts it: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes".
I was struck when in hospital at the regularity of many people's lives. And I imagine if your life has been that regular, where you know the career path ahead, arriving at such a dramatic crossroads as a spinal cord injury is bound to shake things up. Obviously, I would not choose my spinal cord injury. But I don't feel that my work-life has dramatically changed direction. Perhaps I am lucky in this way. I don't feel bitter about my injury. Yes, I've had to face challenges I'd never imagined. I've moved from being in a position of white, middle-class male privilege to being in a minority. My body is different. But my mind is still the same.
