There I was, out minding my own business on 24 May, walking the streets of Dunedin at 6 am with guide Jo and husband Ron when “bang” out of the blue, I get clipped by the side of a bus, go up in the air, come back down again on the side of the road, all bloodied and limp. It happened so quickly I can barely remember it. In fact I didn’t even know it was happening which I am sure saved me in the end. Being completely loose and not tense, as I described to a Maori Hill Primary school student who wrote to me asking what had happened, “I bounced off the bus like a bouncy ball, and not like a hard cricket ball which I would have been if I had seen the bus coming!”

Maybe that’s how we should be living our life. Like a bouncy ball, rather than a cricket ball. Bouncy balls just bounce off what they come in contact with. They don’t aim, or do anything deliberate, they just bounce around, pinging off surface to surface, surviving anything because they just bounce off it and bounce somewhere else!

This is opposed to a cricket ball, which is hard and fast, and looking ahead to aim at what it can hit. If I’d been a cricket ball last Tuesday, I would have gone straight through that bus’s windscreen.

I’ve always seen bouncy balls as a bit purposeless, and annoying even. My boys spent their childhood with those bloody bouncy balls. Bouncing them all around the living room, it drove me nuts! I couldn’t see the point of the damn things but they seemed to.

So what can we learn from bouncy balls? Could it be that rather than trying to control what is lying ahead, instead we just bounce off whatever it is that life throws at us?

To bounce through life, that sounds so nice. Why don’t we all aspire to bounce through life? What does that counjour up for you?

Big hugs from this bouncy blind woman!

Jx

Blind Wisdom Stacked.pdf