The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I've been doing a lot of wandering around inside my own mind lately.  I don't stay focused on any one thought very long before I'm off pondering something new.  I'm thinking about life, purpose, after-life, the force we call God.....  Why do we humans have such a strong drive to give life meaning?

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a medical thriller.  The cast of characters included an elderly man who had "locked-in syndrome" as the result of an accident.  Locked-in syndrome is where your brain stem is damaged and although it still transmits messages to your brain, it can not transmit messages FROM your brain.  As a result, the individual is completely paralyzed but can still feel pain and discomfort.  By completely paralyzed, I mean unable to even breath without the help of a respirator.  In a small percentage of cases, the individual will have muscle control in one or both eyes. 

So, in this book I was reading, reference was made to Jean-Dominique Bauby, a Frenchman who was the editor of the magazine Elle.  He suffered a stroke and as a result, ended up with locked-in syndrome.  I wondered if this was a true story or made up for the sake of the book, so I goggled him.  Turns out, it was a true story and he wrote a book about his experience called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

I logged on to Amazon.com and ordered the book.  It's a small book and I was able to read it through in less than an hour.  But the impression it made on me was immense!  Bauby died within days of the book's publication.  He was one of the "lucky" few who are able to blink an eye and it was by blinking, one painful letter at time, that he was able to share his trapped thoughts and experiences with the outside world.

The title of the book refers to his condition.  The diving bell is his locked-in body, but the butterfly is his mind, which is free to travel wherever it wants  and do whatever it desires.  He had an amazing strength of spirit!

One passage that struck me was his reaction at seeing himself reflected in a window as he was being wheeled through the hospital.  He writes,

...Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde.  His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear.  One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain.  For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil, before I realized it was only mine.  Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me.  Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold.  There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.

In another passage he declares that he would be the happiest of men "if I could just swallow the overflow of saliva that endlessly floods my mouth." 

I'm thinking, here was this man who couldn't do anything but think and blink one eye and yet he managed to touch the lives of countless people and influence change.  (Although I'd never heard of his story, it seems people around the world have because I read endless testaments to the positive impact he has had on individual lives.) 

So, the aimless wandering I've been doing in my own mind lately is really a search for my own path.  What can I do with my life of good health and privilege to make an impact of my own?  And why is this even important to me?