I turned 60 this year, a notable accomplishment marked by great family joy, personal self-reflection and an accelerated schedule of colonoscopies. In the world of numbers, while 59 was a prime year, that is one that can only be divided by one and itself, 60 lends itself multiple divisions (30X2; 15X4; 5X12…..). Thus, these past months have provided me with an opportunity to divide my years and look at my life in stages or segment; for example, those spent single and those spent married, and those spent without children and those spent with. And without question, the second halves of these life stages have been far more rich, rewarding and meaningful than the first. On this coming Jewish New Year, as we collectively reflect on the years that have passed and plan for those to come, I send my wishes that each segment your life that awaits you is richer, more meaningful and more filled with peace and joy.
In this context of life and its segments, I ponder another division in my life and reflect that the second thirty years of being a dyslexic have been much more pleasant than the first. Two words, two glorious, life-altering words that have brought me from great darkness into light and from despair to destiny account for this life transformation. Those words; ‘spell check’[1].
Spell check has transformed my dyslexia from a real disability to more of a nuisance. I continue to reverse numbers, mistake my left foot for my right and compensate for my continued writing challenges by limiting my hand-written communications to brief, terse messages: “Hello – am fine, David”. I have come to delight in dyslexic jokes, my favorites being the “dog” “god” variety e.g., “Untied Church of Dog” and the one about the paranoid dyslexic who always has the unsettling feeling that he is following somebody.
I have come to understand that the vestiges of my dyslexia have left an imprint on my worldview, my weltanschauung, (bless you spell check) that provides for and, perhaps, encourages perceiving the world in a different way – reversing things, turning things around. That in a wink of an eye we can transform ‘god’ into ‘dog’ is perhaps a good thing. God and our understanding of God is now available for further reflection, for reshaping and rethinking. That one may have the unsettling feeling that he is following somebody is a good thing. Our world would be a profoundly better and more peaceful place if collectively we were more reflective about whom we are following and who we venerate as leaders and heroes. Political and social change represents the “dyslexic-ing” of the social or political order. In the sphere of science, in transposing space and time, Einstein demonstrated that he was, perhaps, greatest dyslexic of all.
We dyslexics see a world that is slightly different and sometimes a bit mixed up. We are, at times, a confused lot, reversing numbers, mistaking our left foot for our right and, of course, advancing new innovations in spelling. But our message that reality, or at least our perceptions of reality, can be plastic, that we have the capacity to reverse and reorder our understanding of our worlds is a good thing – perhaps, a necessary thing.
The upcoming High Holy Days call for all of us to be open to dyslexic-like reflective flexibility. What/who is our God? What does God ask us to believe? How does God guide us to act? How does our God enable us to live a life of meaning, a life that makes sense? Who are we following? What values do these individuals advance? Is the organization, the city, the nation, and the world that they envision and that they seek to build one where people are treated with greater humanity or one where peace and harmony can reign?
In the coming year of 5773 let’s celebrate the dyslexics around us and the dyslexics within us and, together, use this capacity to see the world in different ways and to create a better world together.
Love and best wishes for a happy, sweet, healthy, and slightly altered 5773.
[1] It is little known that initial development of the algorithms that power spell check go back to the 1960’s and the research at Stanford University headed by ‘Les Earnest’, a computer programmer with a name more fitting for a politician. Les’s research came to fruition with Word Star and Word Perfect on the first IBM and IBM clones in the early 1980’s.
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