“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
Helen Keller
Good morning peeps, meditation done.
Quote for the day:
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
Helen Keller
It is so important to have true friends in your life, not only to share the good times with you, but you need them even more when you are going through tough times, to guide you through the darkness, help you towards the light.
The words of today’s quote are even more poignant when you consider they were written by someone who was both deaf and blind.
Helen Keller was born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, she was born with the ability to see and hear.
At 19 months old, she contracted an illness described by doctors as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain”, which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis.
The illness left her both deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family.
In 1886, Keller’s mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens’ American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman, Laura Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice.
Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston.
Michael Anagnos, the school’s director, asked 20-year-old former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to become Keller’s instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-year-long relationship during which Sullivan evolved into Keller’s governess and eventually her companion.
The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.
Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller’s house in March 1887, and immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with “d-o-l-l” for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it.
In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for “mug”, Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller’s big breakthrough in communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of “water”; she then nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.
Starting in May 1888, Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind. In 1894, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan moved to New York to attend the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf.
In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts, and Keller entered The Cambridge School for Young Ladies before gaining admittance, in 1900, to Radcliffe College, where she lived in Briggs Hall, South House. Her admirer, Mark Twain, had introduced her to Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, who, with his wife Abbie, paid for her education.
In 1904, at the age of 24, Keller graduated from Radcliffe, becoming the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. She maintained a correspondence with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Wilhelm Jerusalem, who was one of the first to discover her literary talent.
Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak, and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures. She learned to “hear” people’s speech by reading their lips with her hands — her sense of touch had become extremely subtle. She became proficient at using braille and reading sign language with her hands as well.
Shortly before World War I, with the assistance of the Zoellner Quartet she determined that by placing her fingertips on a resonant tabletop she could experience music played close by.
At age 22, Keller published her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), with help from Sullivan and Sullivan’s husband, John Macy. It recounts the story of her life up to age 21 and was written during her time in college.
Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. A prolific author, Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles and was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015.
She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. She was a suffragist, a pacifist, an opponent of Woodrow Wilson, a radical socialist and a birth control supporter.
In 1915 she and George Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition.
In 1920 she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people.
Keller met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed over in the popular mind
She was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in 1971.
Her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum and sponsors an annual “Helen Keller Day”. Her birthday on June 27 is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and was authorized at the federal level by presidential proclamation by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the 100th anniversary of her birth.
On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the United States’ two highest civilian honors. In 1965 she was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair.
Helen Keller was an amazing woman, who achieved remarkable things, despite her disabilities, paving the way for thousands of death and blind people after her. But she could not of done it without her teacher, companion and life long friend Anne Sullivan and then Polly Thompson who was a young woman from Scotland who had no experience with deaf or blind people. She progressed to working as a secretary as well, and eventually became a constant companion to Keller.
Anne Sullivan died in 1936 after a coma, with Keller holding her hand. Keller and Thompson moved to Connecticut. They traveled worldwide and raised funds for the blind. Thomson had a stroke in 1957 from which she never fully recovered, and died in 1960. Winnie Corbally, a nurse who was originally brought in to care for Thomson in 1957, stayed on after her death and was Keller’s companion for the rest of her life.
Keller devoted much of her later life to raising funds for the American Foundation for the Blind and then suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.
She died in her sleep on June 1, 1968, at her home, Arcan Ridge, located in Easton, Connecticut, a few weeks short of her eighty-eighth birthday. A service was held in her honor at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., she was cremated and her ashes were placed there next to her constant companions, Anne Sulivan and Polly Thompson.
Helen Keller’s remarkable life of achievement against all the odds, shows that you can achieve any thing you want in life if you stay focused and never, ever, ever give up. But it also shows how important it is to have good people and friends around you and I think it was a beautiful touch that she was cremated together two with her constantant companions and friends who helped her achieve so much.
Make sure you remember to show the people who mean the most to you, how much you appreciate them and make sure they know how much you love them, for no one can become successful on their own, we all need people by our side.
Have a wonderful Wednesday peeps,
Breathe, Believe and Achieve
Be Happy, Healthy and Wise
Steve Agyei
Founder of Beyond Lifestyle Secrets
Author of Celebrity Training Secrets
