This world will amaze you

I just came back from walking the dog in the park. While there, we met a guy. We stopped and chatted. He told me his story. I now feel exuberant.

His story contained joy and tragedy; points of recognition; coincidence; verve and laughter. It amazed me. It goes like this:

If you’ve read my posts recently, or saw my book review on Thoughtwrestling today, you’ll know I have a keen interest in the brain. This is where this story begins: the man I met had suffered a brain injury – that’s the tragic element. It’s also the first coincidence element: on a day when I have a post that talks about the brain and how it rewires itself, I meet a guy whose brain is rewiring itself.

This guy has been in a wheelchair for the last six years. He didn’t say what caused the injury but it appears to have had an effect similar to a stroke. He suffered paralysis. As he pointed out, one side of him (his right arm) was still affected but improving.

Since the injury, he hasn’t walked until last week. He’d been wheelchair bound. And only in the last few days had he ventured out of the house because, initially, walking involved a good deal of falling. (He had a medical cane with him today.)

Now he was not only out of the house, he was in the park up in the trails. That alone is amazing (a joyful element).

As we spoke, I learned he was from Wildwood, Alberta – a town a bit to the west of Edmonton. That was the second coincidence element. I had lived in Edmonton until about four years ago. I had lived there for almost twenty years. He had lived there too until moving to Fredericton about two decades back.

When I mentioned I was from Edmonton, his eyes widened. We started talking about the city. He had lived on 124th Street, rode his bike to Concordia College, knew Old Strathcona and just about everything else about the city. I mentioned I had worked in St. Albert for a while – his uncle lived there. We talked about how the city had grown, laughed when I joked it wouldn’t be long before Leduc was part of Edmonton, and generally had a great time identifying all these points of recognition.

He’s headed to Edmonton for a visit next week – leaves on Saturday. That’s when a friend of mine leaves for Edmonton for a visit. My guess is they’ll be on the same plane.

What is truly amazing in all this, however, is how his brain and body are healing themselves, doing what needs doing to reconstitute and adjust. I’m absolutely astonished that he had been in a wheelchair for six years until a week ago. Yes, he was walking slowly and it was clearly a struggle, but he was already in the middle of the damn park!

From his face, you could see he wasn’t walking; he was floating.

The other wonderful thing he told me (though not in these words) was how he was rediscovering the world – his world. Although from Alberta, he had been living in Fredericton for about twenty years now. He knew it well and had seen it as it grew. He remembered when Prospect Street was trees and farmland, something it clearly is not now (it’s basically major traffic artery with strip malls, one of the least attractive areas of an otherwise beautiful city).

On the walks he had made so far, he told me he had seen things he hadn’t noticed before. He had been walking on streets he use to drive and only now noticing trees he remembered seeing first planted years ago. He was seeing houses and buildings he had never noticed despite going by them every day for years. In his words, “I had never seen any of that before.”

At the beginning, I mentioned that this encounter left me feeling exuberant. It has and it’s because I think that was what he was feeling and communicating. It’s the kind of feeling that is contagious.

It was thrilling to see the look on his face, a kind of mix of joy and wonder. Like me, he was amazed he was walking. He was also amazed at the sense of seeing the world for the first time. He was amazed at having met someone who knew Edmonton like he did, even though we’re over 2,000 miles from it (just under 3500 kilometers).

And we were both amazed at how amazing the world is sometimes.