英語勵(lì)志美文精華 14 A Ball to Roll Around 滾球
A Ball to Roll Around
By Robert Allman
I lost my sight when I was 4 years old by falling off a boxcar in a freight yard in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and landing on my head. Now, I am 32. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again. But a calamity can do strange things to people.
It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life so, as I do, if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me more appreciate what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid, but I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—oh, a potential to live you might call it—which I didn’t see. And they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say believe in myself, I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it, but I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate, pattern of people, there is a special place where I can make myself fit. It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things.
When I was a youngster, once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me, and I was hurt.
“I can’t use this,” I said.
“Take it with you, “ he urged me, “and roll it around.”
The words stuck in my head: “Roll it around, roll it around.” By rolling the ball, I could listen where it went. This gave me an idea—how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind, I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it groundball.
All my life, I have set ahead of me a series of goals, and then tried to reach them one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach, because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway, but on the average, I made progress.
I believe I made progress more readily because of a pattern of life shaped by certain values. I find it easier to live with myself if I try to be honest. I find strength in the friendship and interdependence of people. I would be blind, indeed, without my sighted friends. And very humbly, I say that I have found purpose and comfort in a mortal’s ambition toward godliness.
Perhaps a man without sight is blinded less by the importance of material things than other men are. All I know is that a belief in the higher existence of a nobility for men to strive for has been an inspiration that has helped me more than anything else to hold my life together.
