4th of July was my Dad’s birthday, but sadly I lost my Dad a few years ago, and I wanted to do something today that kind of honoured him a little bit and paid a bit of a tribute to him. So I’ve decided to put this post together that I’m calling Five Great Things that I Learned From My Disabled Dad.
My Dad was afflicted with polio as a small child, and as a result of that became paralyzed from the neck down. He was like that for quite some time, and there was another whole range of stories around his father and what his father did to try and find a cure for him. But in the end, his Dad took him out of the hospital, grabbed him out of the hospital bed and took him to the people that had the polio vaccine, which at the time was still not widely accepted, and he got him the polio vaccine. So, as a result of that, he was able to restore movement in everything but his legs, and so the most amount of movement he had in his legs while I was growing up was the fact that he could wiggle a couple of toes on one foot.
Growing up with a Dad in a wheelchair made a big impact on my life, and so here are five things that I learned from my disabled Dad.
Number one is to THINK DIFFERENTLY.
Obviously, growing up with a Dad in a wheelchair I saw things from a very different perspective to a lot of other kids. I experienced things a lot of other kids didn’t experience, but I also got to see the way that my Dad approached things and the way that he thought about everyday things that we take for granted. My Dad couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. He couldn’t drive a car the way that everybody else did drive a car. He could drive a car, and for those that are interested, hand controls to actually control the accelerator and the brake pedal next to the steering wheel. So, it is possible, but you just have to think about it differently, and watching him do that every single day I think that is something that has rubbed off on me. I think I’ve got the ability now to really consider things from many different perspectives and really step back and have a think about other ways to achieve something.
Number two is to GIVE.
When I was growing up, my Dad found it very hard to get work because he was disabled. He could get jobs from time to time, but the regularity of work was very hard. There was still a lot of discrimination against disabled people, although we’ve come a long way since then. There’s probably still a long way to go, but he found it very hard to get regular, consistent work. When he wasn’t doing that, he really wanted to still be able to help people that he thought and he saw as having it harder than him. One of the things he would do is he would spend time in shopping centers selling raffle tickets for not-for-profit organizations that looked after the mentally disabled or the homeless or people like that.
He actually did quite a bit of giving of himself, of his skills, of his resources whenever he was able, and so that’s something that I’ve taken to heart and I believe is a fundamental thing in life, that we should be giving to those around us in some way. You might not ever see that come back to you in cash or whatever, but the return on investment of giving, to me, is a legacy issue and then it’s something I can go to bed at night knowing that I’ve done something to help somebody else.
Number three is PERSEVERE.
There’s very few people in the world who haven’t had to work for the things that they really wanted, and my Dad being in a wheelchair obviously had to work hard just to get some things that we take for granted. To watch him just attack life in that way was truly inspirational for me. He didn’t complain about his disability. He didn’t complain and whinge about the fact that life had done him wrong. He just got on with life, and if he wanted something he’d set his mind to it and he just persevered until he got what he wanted. That’s been a massive learning for me in the way that I approach things.
Number four to be SELF-AWARE.
This is a really important one for me. My Dad was very aware of his physical limitations, but he didn’t let it apply to his mental limitations. He would apply those skills of thinking differently and persevering to achieve what he wanted, but he knew he had to work differently around it because he had certain limitations that were real. He couldn’t change those. The flip side of being self-aware is to actually stop and take stock of your successes and achievements along the way.
Towards the end of my Dad’s life, we would chat about the things that he had done and the things that he still wanted to do. I remember him making the comment that he never felt like he’d actually achieved the goal of becoming a professional writer, and I had to remind him that he’d actually spent some time writing for a children’s television show on one of their commercial TV stations. He started by submitting scripts to one of the segments that they had, a little detective show that they had on that kid show, and they took his scripts and they produced them. He actually appeared in one all about the different approach that disabled people have to do just to do things differently in life, and so he solved the crime because he could think differently about those things. And then he created a whole new segment and wrote every single script for it, and they produced that.
So, I had to remind him that he’d done that, and just because of the way he attacked life and he just kind of did everyday just kind of went day after day after day and just kept moving forward, he actually never stopped to really take stock of the achievements that he had made in his life. Then, I considered that for myself and realized that I do exactly the same thing, that I just get out there and I just do every day. When I actually stop and think back about the things that I’ve achieved, they’re actually way more than I thought, and that’s really empowering and very encouraging to know that I’ve done it, I can do it again, and that if I actually want to grow that there is the potential there.
The fifth thing is that IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO CHANGE.
Early in my childhood I remember my Dad being a bit of a drinker, and when I speak to my older siblings, they’ve actually told me that when they were young it was actually he was quite a heavy drinker. He told me a story himself once of when he split up with his first wife he was a bit drunk and he tried to burn the house down just to spite her. So he wasn’t the greatest of guys, and when I was a child I remember my mom and Dad becoming Christians. Now, I know religion is not for everyone, but this was a real turning point in their life and it changed the way that they were day to day. It really made a massive difference to them.
Later in life, when I started working a little bit closely with my Dad on writing screenplays and working on the projects that he wanted to work on, I was absolutely inspired by his desire to continue to learn, to continue to develop himself and develop greater skills. And it would be really easy to package this up into just learning more and continuing to learn, but I actually think it goes beyond that. It wasn’t just technical skills, storytelling structures, and technology that he wanted to learn. He was constantly assessing himself as a man and how he could be better at being a father and husband and just a person in the world, and I found that incredibly powerful.
If a guy in a wheelchair can do it, so can you.