Support the Carroll Center for the Blind

In case you do not know, I am blind. I lost eyesight to a sudden vascular event in April 2020. The event occluded retinal arteries in both eyes completly ablating the retina layer that receives visual signals. That means that my eyes suddenly stopped?to receive visual signals. In other words, I do not see. While loss of eyesight is overwhelming it can be completely debilitating. Although, eyesight is just one of the common senses, it dominates our sensory world, and leads us to believe that life is impossible without eyesight.

Previous to loss of eyesight, my personal life, my professional life, and even my spiritual life relied upon my ability to see. Or so I thought.

Serenity to Accept

Loss of eyesight took me through the full nine yard of the five stages of grief, from denial, to anger, to bargaining, to depression and finally to acceptance, as described to us by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in 1969. I am now in radical acceptance, following the wise counsel ?of Tara Branch, as I explained in the Article Accept Radically to Succeed in Life .?

Only after accepting radically that I am blind, and I cannot change that, I shifted focus to things that I can change, remembering the Serenity Prayer, “God grant me serenity to accept things that I cannot change, to change things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.” In my case I cannot change that I am blind. I can change myself to learn new skills to activate all the other senses that have been subjugated by eyesight. I decided to focus on things I can change. I enquired about those things. That is when I was introduced to The Carroll Center for the Blind.

All Senses Activated

Teams of great people at the Carroll Center for the Blind zoomed in on me to my sense of touch, with sensory arts training where I relearned how to know things by sense of touch.

Orientation and mobility helped me to relearn how to navigate the inside world, and even outside world through senses of locomotion.

Personal management training helped me to relearn how to take care of my activities of daily living such as making delicious meals without burning myself, cleaning, and the like. I relearned instrumental activities of daily living such as shopping, balancing checks dealing with other organizations of importance and government agencies, plowing through piles of paperwork, required of us by life. ?

I relearned how to activate accessibility functions on the mobile phones for navigating the cell phone by voice activated commands and gestures using fingers. I learned Braille.

Significantly, I relearned to navigate the computer using key board commands with screen reader software.

This complete relearning of how to use the computer without the benefit of point and click function of the mouse is what has made it possible for me to write to you this message. Navigating the web is a completely different matter, which without intensive training by well learned folks at the Carroll Center’s Technical Center would be very difficult for mere mortals. But these great teachers make it come to you as easy as a walk in the park. A cake walk so to speak.

My Point

This brings me to the point of writing this message to you. The Carroll Center makes all these great but expensive things happen through financial gifts from people like you and me, who donate. The Center is holding the Annual Fundraising Walk for Independence this June.?Please join me in supporting the Carroll Center for the Blind so that it will have resources to help even more people rediscover their senses to help them live independently.

https://www.classy.org/fundraiser/4554916

I am forever grateful to you for your support.