151This was Helen Keller’s poetic way of recommend-
ing optimistic thinking. What you look at and what you
face grows in your life. What you ignore falls behind
you. But if you turn and look only at the shadows, they
become your life.
When I was younger I remember hearing other kids
tell a joke about Helen Keller. “Have you heard about
the Helen Keller doll?” they would ask. “You wind it up
and it bumps into things.”
I’ve often thought about that joke, and why such a
joke about someone who was deaf and blind was funny.
I think the answer lies in our nervousness about other
people overcoming huge misfortunes. (Perhaps we laugh
nervously because we haven’t overcome our own small
ones.)
In our own day and age, we are quick to consider
ourselves victims. We are all victims of some sort of emo-
tional, social, gender, or racial abuse. We enjoy taking
what difficulties we have had in life and blowing them
up into huge injustices.
Helen Keller didn’t complain about being from a dys-
functional family, or of being a woman, or of not being
given enough money from the government to compen-
sate her for her handicaps. She had challenges most of
us can’t even imagine, but she refused to become fasci-
nated by them and make her handicaps her life. She
didn’t want to focus on the shadows when there was so
much sun.
There is a bumper sticker that I see every so often
as I’m driving around: “Life is a bitch and then you die.”
I always wonder about that bumper sticker because it
seems illogical. If life is that bad, death should be wel-
come. The sticker should say, “Life is a bitch, but the
good news is you die.”
Face the sun