Confinement vs. Freedom jordanmarsh6, June 28, 2021April 5, 2023 My wife recently told me an interesting story. She was doing her fieldwork in occupational therapy. Part of her job was to help people ambulate who had just recently had surgery. It was shocking to a lot of her patients how quickly they would have them walking after surgery; usually it was within 24 hours. She saw a lot of different things like hip replacements, amputations, transplants, and many more. She told me about how interesting it was to see how different people processed the different procedures they had done. On the scale of surgeries she dealt with, for example, hip replacements were pretty minor. On the opposite end of that scale was something like amputations which sometimes even resulted in multiple limbs taken in one procedure. She told me about one woman who had a hip replacement. This particular woman was rude to the therapists, didn’t want any help, and was very vocal about how awful her predicament was. On the other end of that, my wife remembers dealing with amputees that were extremely grateful for the help they had been given. The amputees were clearly in for a long road of recovery and their way of life would never be the same. I don’t mean to judge. The lady with the hip replacement could have been just having a bad day. My wife also said that some of the amputees may have been in denial about their new condition and might later realize what had really happened to them. But let’s just assume for the sake of this post that their attitudes accurately reflected their outlook. What is our outlook like? When I think of a hip replacement, I think a couple things: there’s no doubt that it is still a challenge, but for the most part you are going to be able to return to a normal functioning level. When I think about an amputation, I think that your way of life is going to be dramatically changed. What makes it so some people with a hip replacement might think it is end of the world, while other people with amputations can be so optimistic? It reminds me of something I heard a long time ago about people in Africa who were able to get wheelchairs through a humanitarian organization. Rather than saying they were “confined” to a wheelchair like we so often do in our developed society, these people said that their wheelchair gave them freedom. For them, they literally could not move anywhere without someone carrying them. When considering how to change our habits, we would do well to take an inventory of the problems we perceive in our lives. There is no doubt that they still are problems, but they might not be as debilitating as we might think them to be. I figure this will go a long way towards helping us feel optimistic about breaking our bad habits. Self Improvement