Re-Imagining Life

I'm finding gems.


I'm casting stones into the waters of the Internet, looking for patterns in the ripples. I'm exploring students with exceptional challenges for Cameron's Ad Research class, in hopes of discovering insights and designing a way to enrich their lives in some way. By starting to peer into hopes, dreams, struggles, and frustrations of complete strangers, I'm starting to see a unique common denominator. Advertising tells us that things which make your life easier, in turn make your life better. I'm starting to take issue with this idea.

Mike Rowe from the show "Dirty Jobs" on the Discovery Channel recently gave a great TED Talk about celebrating hard work and how by performing a goat castration, he realized how wrong he had been in his suppositions about life in general. If you've not seen what he had to say, it's a hilarious talk and worth checking out to re-imagine how you think about work.

In my research, I just found a great analogy for re-framing the unique life experiences of people with daily challenges. By changing the lenses, you can look at almost any situation through rose colored glasses. Emily Perl Kingsley writes about this in her piece below:

WELCOME TO HOLLAND

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......

When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."

"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."

But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Here's hoping I find some valuable patterns in these ripples.


Here's what Mike had to say: