Inspired by my friend Livia I have decided to post a bit of a personal retrospective on the year past. I know my blog is often a mixed bag of personal and professional posts and I promise to tackle that in the coming year. Until then the mix continues …
I am a very fortunate man.
My wife is an amazing woman. She is wise, strong, and takes amazingly good care of me. Without her my life would not be nearly as good as it is. It is a true blessing to have her in my life.
My career as an information architect is incredibly satisfying. I have great friends in the field. I feel fortunate to have given back to my profession since it has given me so much. My work on navigation saw print last year. James Kalbach included my research in his book Designing Web Navigation from O’Reilly.
I am living one of my childhood dreams – I make toys! I have been given the opportunity to work with some amazing artists like John Kovalic, Carl Jones, Delme, olive47, NoseG, and others (I can’t name them publicly … yet). I have been interviewed in magazines and news papers. My toys even slipped into a Pizza Hut commercial.
I have much to be thankful for – a strong faith, fun hobbies, a video game I am actually good at, a wonderful and supportive family, and an wonderful dog named Grif yes we named him after that Grif.
Don’t get me wrong. My life is not all happiness and joy. My wife has been stricken with one of the most insidious illnesses I have ever known – CFIDS. She has been sick since 1994 and I had only known her for three months before this debilitating disease entered our lives. It has altered the course of our lives in ways we never would have imagined. We cannot raise the family we had hoped to raise. We cannot do the things we love to do because Jennie can only be active for a few hours a day. She often spends days in bed, unable to do much but sleep and lie in a state of bodily imprisonment.
I struggle daily with the effects of ADHD. My short term memory tests nearly two standards deviations below the norm. I struggle with hyper focus, distractibility, and mild hyperactivity. The impairment that ADHD has wrought in my life is incalculable. If I had not struggled with it as I have I wonder how much more I could have done, and could be doing. The limitations imposed by this illness are maddening – an never ending source of frustration.
But the theme for this year for both my wife and for me has been counter strike! My wife is the Chairman of the National CFIDS Association. She battles everyday to help shape an organized response to CFIDS and the harm it inflicts on the millions that suffer from it. My fight is more personal. I work with some fine folks at Penn’s Behavioral Health: Adult ADHD program. With their help I am taking back my life from an illness that could just as easily relegated me to the sidelines.
So I count my blessings and fight to overcome those things that hold me and my loved ones back from living the life we want to live. This year has been a year of challenges and victories. I am sure each and every year will be much like this. My guide through all of this is a passage from Writings of the Baha’i Faith that was read at a devotional gathering back on September 15, 1990 (a spiritual birthday – of sorts):
Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men. Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression. Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts. Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility.
- Baha’u'llah
Hope you don’t mind the preachy bit, but faith is a big part of what gets me through life. That and bacon.