"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart. "
~Helen Keller
Helen Keller was born in 1880 in Alabama. Before she was two years old she had lost her sight and her hearing to scarlett fever. With this barrier to all communication and learning, Keller became a wild little creature who terrorized her home until 1887, when Anne Sullivan, a teacher from the Perkins School for the Blind, arrived on the scene and changed Keller's life.
Most of us hear the story in elementary school of how Anne Sullivan finally broke through to Helen by writing on her hand while holding it under running well water. It is ironic to me is that those first years that Helen was so wild, she was just a child with an incredible capacity for learning who was frustrated by her limitations! Once she learned to communicate, she learned not only words and sentences, but to read and to write braille, even to write with a ruler and pencil.
What I find the most amazing about this woman was not only her incredible curiosity about life and her thirst for knowledge, but her constant desire and determination to take it to the next level. She learned to speak, went to college (Radcliffe, of all places-the women's version of Harvard), rode horseback, could communicate in French, German & Latin, and played chess. (I can't do most of these...LOL) And although braille books were not terribly prevelant at the time, she didn't let that stop her, Anne Sullivan just "spoke" them into Helen's hand.
She also knew Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain, met Henry Ford and the Rockefellers. She was a Suffragist in the early 1900s. Among many other writings, Helen wrote her very own autobiography at the age of 21, The Story of My Life, which was the first book I read on my Cupcake Reading List.
Helen was certainly blessed to have been born into a family that could afford to provide her with all of these opportunites to improve her life -- but even with those privileges, how many of us would consider our lives 'a daring adventure' if we could not see or hear?
This is a pretty impressive list for someone who has no disabilities...it is an inspiration knowing that the woman who accomplished all these things was deaf and blind, living in a world of darkness that I cannot even imagine. In those moments when I think my life is too hard or my dreams are too difficult to attempt I will try to remember this beautiful soul who never lost her enthusiasm for living and for learning:
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. " ~Helen Keller
[Biographical information obtained from the American Foundation for the Blind]
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