THERE’S MORE TO LIFE THAN INCREASING YOUR SPEED.” When we first came across this quote from Gandhiji, our one office computer had just died. The e-mail we had installed could receive but not send messages. The faxes we got were so illegible we had to wait for the original text to arrive in the mail to see what was so urgent.
Gandhi’s words were both a comfort and a reminder: how had we ever forgotten what really mattered?
In a world which increasingly values speed and efficiency above all else, the slow, painstaking efforts of children with special needs can seems anachronistic and futile. So much time and so little to show for it! But for those who work with them, these children are teachers, guides in a life which grows more frantic and bewildering every day.
They show us down. They demand our time and then help to see how much of it we really have. They need us to take a hard job like buttoning a shirt and break it down for them into small manageable steps and then we learn to do that with the hard jobs in our own lives. They remind us to choose our words carefully, to move quietly, to notice all the small things going right and then build on them. They keep us simple and true.
-–Jo Chopra
