When your life has absolute dependency on others

credit: neuromajor.ucr.edu

Synopsis:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is a translation of the French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon by journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby. It describes what his life is like after suffering a massive stroke that left him with a condition called locked-in syndrome. It also details what his life was before the stroke.

On December 8, 1995, Bauby, the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. He awoke 20 days later, mentally aware of his surroundings but physically paralyzed with the exception of some movement in his head and left eye. The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid, in July and August 1996. A transcriber repeatedly recited a French language frequency-ordered alphabet (E, S, A, R, I, N, T, U, L, etc.), until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. The book took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. The book also chronicles everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome. These events include playing at the beach with his family, getting a bath, and meeting visitors.

-credit: wikipedia

一本非常震撼人心的書. 如有意要讀, 像我一樣 - 淚腺發達的朋友, 最好先準備些紙巾, 因為每一章, 每一頁, 都值妳的眼淚.
一個成功的男人, 世界彷彿在他掌握的中. 一夜間, 不只變得一無所有, 更悽涼的是變成在每一個情況下, 在沒有別人的幫助就活不下去.

One of the sentence written by the author that deeply touched me:
"But for now, I would be the happiest of men if I could just swallow the overflow of saliva endlessly flooding my mouth"
Did we ever once in our life feel so blessed and fortunate to be able to swallow our own saliva?
Most of the time we are just too greedy of achieving, too busy of comparing and too blind of looking at what we're capable of.
Most of the time we just pay too much attention on people we set an eye on, too easy influenced by strangers and too easy to neglect those who really care about us.
Just because we're too good at taking things for granted.

If the author were still alive, I would have said this to him:
"You probably ain't the happiest of men for not being able to swallow the overflow of saliva, yet you're the luckiest of the locked-in syndrome men for still having control of your left eye which make it possible for you to finish the book."

Happiness is not hard if we can just pay little attention to what we've got instead of pay much attention to what we don't have.