Life Without Limits (13 page)

Instead of focusing on her limited vision in one eye, Linda chooses to be grateful that she is able to think, speak, walk, and live a normal life in most ways. You and I have the ability to choose our attitudes just as she chose hers.

You don’t have to be a saint to do that. When you experience a tragedy or a personal crisis, it’s perfectly normal and probably
healthy to go through stages of fear and anger and sadness, but at some point we all have to say: “I’m still here. Do I want to spend the rest of my life wallowing in misery, or do I want to rise above what has happened to me and pursue my dreams?”

Is it easy to do that? No, it is not. It takes great determination, not to mention a sense of purpose, hope, faith, and the belief that you have talents and skills to share. But Linda is just one example of many, many people who’ve shown what it’s possible to overcome with a positive attitude. The age-old, time-proven, undeniable truth is that you and I may have absolutely no control over what happens to us, but we can control how we respond. If we choose the right attitude, we can rise above whatever challenges we face.

You likely will have no control over the next big bad bump in your life. A hurricane hits your house. A drunk driver crashes into your car. Your employer lays you off. Your significant other says, “I need space.” We are all blindsided from time to time. Be sad, feel bad, but then pull yourself up and ask,
What’s next?
Once you’ve whimpered awhile, vented, or shed all the tears in your tank, pull yourself together and make an attitude adjustment.

You can change your attitude and change your life without taking a pill, seeing a shrink, or trekking to a mountaintop to consult a guru. So far in this book I’ve been encouraging you to find your purpose, to have hope for the future and faith in the possibilities for your life, and to love yourself as you are. Those attributes will give you a strong foundation and reason for optimism, which is the power source for adjusting your attitude, much like the batteries in your television remote control.

Have you ever known a successful, fulfilled, happy person who is also a pessimist? I haven’t. That’s because optimism is empowering—it gives you control over your emotions. Pessimism weakens
your will and allows your moods to control your actions. With an optimistic outlook, you can adjust your attitude to make the best of bad situations. This is sometimes described as “reframing” because while you can’t always change your circumstances, you
can
change the way you look at them.

At first, you may have to do this consciously, but once you practice it for a while, it becomes automatic. I am on tour constantly with my caregivers, and in the early days of my speaking career, when a flight was canceled or a connection missed, I had trouble controlling my anger and frustration. Finally I had to face the fact that when you travel as often as we do, there will be problems. Besides, I was getting too old to throw tantrums, and they sort of lose their effectiveness when you can’t really stomp your feet.

I had to master the ability to adjust my attitude about travel interruptions. Now when we are forced to sit for hours in airports or need to abruptly change plans, I avoid stress, frustration, and anger by focusing on a positive interpretation of the negative event. I fire up optimistic thoughts such as:
Our flight was delayed because of bad weather. That’s good, because we’ll have a safer trip if we wait out the storm
.

Or:
They canceled our flight because of mechanical problems. I’d rather wait here on the ground for a good plane than be up in the air in a bad one
.

I’d still rather have a smooth trip than a bumpy one, but the alternative to adjusting my attitude was to dwell on the negative, and that’s just not healthy. When you allow circumstances beyond your control to determine your attitude and actions, you risk plunging into a downward spiral of hasty decisions and faulty judgments, to overreacting, giving up too soon, and missing those opportunities that always—always—appear just when you think life will never get better.

Pessimism and negativity will ensure that you never rise above
your circumstances. When you feel your blood boiling due to negative thoughts, tune them out and replace them with more positive and encouraging inner dialogue. Here are examples of negative versus positive thinking to help you monitor your own inner voices.

My friend Chuck, who is forty years old, learned last year that the cancer he’d fought off twice while in his twenties had reappeared. This time the tumor was so wrapped around vital organs that doctors could not go after it with radiation. The prognosis did not look good—in fact, he was in serious trouble. As a husband and father with a huge circle of family and friends, Chuck had purpose. He also had hope, faith, and self-love working for him. So he adopted the attitude that he was not about to die. In fact, he took on the attitude that while there was sickness inside him, he was not a sick person. He was determined to remain upbeat and positive and focused on moving ahead with his life.

At this point, no one would have described Chuck as a lucky guy, right? Yet the very fact that radiation was not an option turned out to be good luck. You see, Chuck’s doctors in St. Louis were taking part in a testing program for an experimental cancer drug that does not use radiation. Instead, this drug targets individual cancer cells and kills them. Since traditional treatments were not suitable for Chuck’s tumor, he was eligible for the experimental treatments, but
what convinced doctors that he should be in the program was his positive attitude. They knew he would make the most of this opportunity, and he did.

While the experimental cancer drug was being injected in his system through an IV tube, Chuck didn’t take it lying down. Instead, he ran on a treadmill. He lifted weights. His attitude was so positive and his energy so high, Chuck had trouble convincing some of the hospital staff that he really belonged on the cancer treatment floor. “You just don’t look or act like our normal patient,” they said.

A few weeks after receiving his experimental treatments, Chuck met with his doctor. The doctor told him that something strange had happened. “I can’t find any sign of the tumor,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Doctors couldn’t say whether it was the experimental drug, or Chuck’s attitude, or a miracle, or a combination of all three that defeated the tumor. All I can tell you is that Chuck walked out of that hospital free of cancer and strong as a bull. Despite all indications that he was facing death, he chose a positive attitude and focused not on being sick but on his purpose, on hope, on faith, and on the conviction that he could be of benefit to others.

Notice that Chuck and Linda both chose attitudes that allowed them to rise above difficult circumstances, but they chose slightly different types of attitudes. Linda chose to be grateful rather than bitter. Chuck chose to take action rather than giving up. There are many attitudes to choose from, but I believe the most powerful are:

1. An attitude of gratitude
   
2. An attitude of action
   
3. An attitude of empathy
   
4. An attitude of forgiveness
   

This is the attitude that Linda unleashed to deal with her injuries from the auto crash. Instead of mourning what she’d lost, she expressed gratitude for what she’d recovered and the life she’d built. I’m a big believer in the power of gratitude. In my speaking I often refer to my little left foot. I do that to put my audiences at ease because they can see my unusual appendage. I joke about it, but I have learned to be very grateful for it. I use it to control my wheelchair joystick, to type on a computer at more than forty words a minute, to play music on my keyboards and digital drum set, and to operate all the applications on my cell phone.

The attitude of gratitude also attracts people who share your enthusiasm and support your dreams. Sometimes these people have the power to inspire you and to change your life in amazing ways. My mum often read to me as a child, and one of my favorite books was
The God I Love
. I was about six years old when she first read it to me. At that time I didn’t know of any other person born without arms and legs. I had no role models who looked like me and had the same challenges. This book, which I still think of often, inspired me and helped build the foundation for an attitude of gratitude because it was written by Joni Eareckson Tada.

Joni (pronounced
Johnny
) was an athletic seventeen-year-old swimmer and equestrian from Maryland who was just a few weeks away from her first semester of college when she broke her neck while diving into a lake. She was paralyzed from the neck down in that 1967 accident. In her book she wrote about her initial despair and thoughts of suicide because of her paralysis, but eventually she came to believe that “it wasn’t some flip of the coin in the cosmos, some turn in the universe’s roulette wheel. It was part of God’s plan for me.”

I loved that book, and then my mum bought a CD of Joni’s songs, which were the first I’d ever heard with lyrics about how “we’ve
all got wheels” and how much fun you could have in a wheelchair and how “nobody’s perfect.” I played those tapes over and over as a child in Australia, and I still catch myself humming them today. You can imagine how amazing it was when I was invited to meet Joni for the first time.

I was visiting the United States in 2003 to speak at a church in California. After my talk a young woman who worked for Joni introduced herself and invited me to come to the headquarters for her charitable organization, Joni and Friends, in Agoura Hills.

During my visit I was star-struck when she came into the room. She leaned in to give me a hug, and we had this great moment. Joni doesn’t have much body strength because of her quadriplegia, so when she leaned in to me she had trouble pulling her body back into her wheelchair. Instinctively, I used my body to give her a gentle push backward into her chair.

“You’re very strong!” she said.

I was thrilled to hear that, of course. This amazing woman who had given me strength and faith and hope as a child was telling me that I was strong. Joni shared that, like me, she struggled with her disability at first. She considered driving her wheelchair off a high bridge but worried that she would only injure her brain and make her life even more miserable. Finally, she prayed,
God, if I can’t die, show me how to live
.

Shortly after that accident, a friend gave Joni a copy of a Bible verse that says, “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God and Christ Jesus concerning you.” Joni was not deeply religious at the time. She was still angry and frustrated over her paralysis and she wasn’t buying that message.

“You can’t be serious,” Joni said. “I don’t feel thankful for this. No way.”

Her friend told her that she didn’t have to feel thankful for being paralyzed. All she had to do was to take a leap of faith and give thanks for the blessings to come.

It was hard for Joni to buy into that concept. At that point she felt like a victim, and that’s what she called herself, “a victim of a terrible diving accident.” At first she blamed everyone but herself for her quadriplegia, and she wanted everyone to pay. She sued. She demanded. She even blamed her parents for bringing her into a world in which she could become paralyzed.

Joni felt the world owed her something because she’d lost the use of her arms and legs. She eventually came to realize that victimhood is an easy place to hide. We can all claim to be the victims of one misfortune or another. Some people feel like victims because they were born into poverty. Others claim to be victims because their parents are divorced, or they have poor health, or bad jobs, or they aren’t as thin or as tall or as beautiful as they want to be.

When we feel entitled to the good in life, we feel robbed and outraged when something happens to make us uncomfortable. We then look to blame others and demand that they pay for our discomfort, whatever it might be. In a self-centered state of mind, we become professional victims. Yet pity parties are the most tedious, unproductive, and unrewarding events you could ever attend. You can only listen to “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” so many times before you want to tear your hair out and run for cover.

Like Joni, you should reject the victim role because there is no future in it. She says that suffering brings us to a fork in the road, and we can choose the downward path to despair or we can take the hopeful path up the hill by adopting an attitude of gratitude. You may find it difficult at first to be grateful, but if you just decide not to be a victim and take it day by day, strength will come. If you can’t find any aspect of your situation to be grateful for, then focus on good days ahead and express gratitude in advance. This will help build a sense of optimism while getting your mind off the past and looking toward the future.

“I realized that the path away from self-destruction was traced somewhere in the pages of the Bible; and it didn’t take long to discover
that well-worn truth: ‘Take one day at a time in the strength of God and you will become more than a conqueror,’ ” Joni told me.

Joni discovered that playing the victim only dragged her down further than her paralysis had taken her, but being thankful for the blessings you have and the blessings to come raises you up. That attitude can change your life just as it has changed Joni’s and mine. Instead of being angry and resentful over our disabilities, we’ve built joyful and fulfilling lives.

An attitude of gratitude truly changed her life, and she in turn helped change my life and the lives of so many others who have been helped by her best-selling inspirational books and DVDs. Her Joni and Friends nonprofit organization operates Wheels for the World, a program that has distributed more than sixty thousand free wheelchairs, not to mention thousands of crutches, canes, and walkers, to disabled people in 102 countries.