Living with Purpose

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(The text that follows is from an email from Glenridge Member Bruce Jackson to Glenridge Director of Life Planning, Lisa Snyder.)

I have been seeing emails about the Ambassadors and other Glenridge folks taking interest in marketing. I hope this energy is helpful.

Here in Crested Butte, Colorado, I’ve been busy training to work as a volunteer at Adaptive Sports, which is an organization that helps people with disabilities participate in sports and in particular the outdoor environment here in Colorado. In the winter, the effort is mostly skiing. Not long ago someone congratulated me for working at this endeavor, in spite of my advanced age. Well, I was polite, but I delivered an impassioned description of life at The Glenridge. You would have been proud of me.

Perhaps the pictures would be helpful in marketing. Our marketing emphasizes how active Glenridge members are, and these pictures speak to that. As a volunteer at Adaptive, I accompany an instructor and a student during a ski lesson. If the student is a paraplegic or quadriplegic, they must learn to ski in a sit-down ski. Among our duties, we volunteers have to learn how to assist in loading and unloading the sit-down skier on and off the chair lift. As a part of that training, we take a few lessons in sit-down skiing ourselves–just for understanding.

In the first picture, the smiles on both faces (the instructor and me) tell a story of joy for which you do not need my words. The second picture shows me actually negotiating a turn, with ski edges tipped.

One of the activities at Adaptive Sports is sled hockey. The player sits on a sled with low back support and holds two short hockey sticks. The blade end of the stick is for hitting the puck. The other end of the stick has a serrated metal edge with which the player can stab the ice to propel his sled. A person with a low- or mid- spinal cord injury is a powerful sled hockey player because of his or her well-developed upper body strength. However, one of the players, Henry, has muscular dystrophy, with weakness in all of his muscles. For him, propelling the sled was nearly impossible. To level the playing field, I pushed his sled.

Henry and I had an interesting problem. Whenever we came to a full stop, I was unable to get us moving again, because my feet could not get enough traction on the ice to move two men and a sled. Henry therefore stabbed both hockey sticks into the ice to propel us forward–slowly and weakly pulling him, the sled and me. Once we were moving, I was able to get enough traction to accelerate us to full speed. What a wonderful metaphor for giving: Henry pulled me so that I could push him.

It was unseasonably cold that evening, with a temperature of minus 5° at the beginning of the match and minus 11° at game’s end. Playing as hard as we were, we were very warm–that is, all except Henry, whose physical activity was less than ours, because he was being pushed. Not surprisingly, Henry was getting cold and took a break in the warming hut. Because he was cold and tired, he elected to enter the warming hut crawling on all fours, rather than expending the incredible effort required for him to stand up. A young family in the warming hut watched Henry as he entered. The man brought his dog over to Henry’s lap to provide heat. He told Henry to pet the dog in order to warm his hands. The puppy was bursting with joy at the attention from Henry. Once again, the eternal circle of giving: the pup gave Henry warmth, and Henry gave the pup his love.

I felt compelled to tell you this story, because the richness I experienced that evening reminds me of the spirit of my Glenridge neighbors.

Bruce
- Bruce Jackson -