An incredible journey
I suppose I was first briefed about the Paralympic opening show some three months ago. Sitting in an East London warehouse, drinking plastic coffee, at a trestle table, I listened to Stephen Daldry and Jenny Sealey.
I watched too as these magician directors of last night’s opening littered the warehouse with artists’ impressions, and matchbox sized mock-ups of their plans. I left with my head a whirr of Orbs, dark matter, and books. I left too in the knowledge that the wondrous presence of Professor Stephen Hawking would be at the centre of events.
But neither then, nor subsequently, when I returned to the self same warehouse to watch disabled acrobats on sway poles and dancers twiddling brollies, could I work out how “Enlightenment” would give birth to inclusion – epic inclusion, and yet subtle inclusion too.
How many of us can ever have known that we would join so many millions of our own and other nation’s kith and kin to share in a celebration of a kind of diversity of which we rarely speak?
When I was a child, if I saw an amputee, I shied away. An artificial arm could sow terror in my small heart. There was a Second World War veterans’ home in our village. I feared shopping in the local shop in case an eye patch or a limp imposed a dreadful sense of loss and difference upon my small mind.
When I ran with the Paralympic torch yesterday I found a petite and pretty woman in our running group. She is in her early thirties and had lost her leg above the knee as a child in a car crash. Her step father had been at the wheel. Her prosthetic was a gorgeous array of shiny steel plates, bolts, and a functioning knee of intricate engineering. She had adorned key elements of it with diamante – it was an extraordinarily alluring creation. I even spotted an allen key poking out from her elegant white trainer in case the knee joint ever needed tightening up. Once upon a time there would have been no diamante, and I could not have borne investigating what had caught my eye.
Even half a decade ago could we have dreamt that the Paralympic flame might be born into the stadium by a double amputee? Would we not once have craved that at least this young brave marine, wounded in Afghanistan, should have the ‘dignity’ of artificial legs. Last night we acknowledged him for the whole person that he is.
What this extraordinarily enlightened backdrop provided for us all was a vast canvas of normality in which the unity and magic of the human spirit were forged as one, eclipsing the physical for the pure aesthetic of who we are.
My own journey from that trestle table has taught me, introduced me, to more in three months than I would ever have believed possible.
I thought I knew the world in which I lived. I thought I lived diversity. I didn’t, I still don’t. The Paralympics, etched so far in its truly remarkable opening, have launched me upon another journey that I never knew I had to take – maybe I never even knew that it was there to be taken. Eventually, it is one we shall all have to take, some few are already arrived – Stephen Daldry and Jenny Sealey among them.
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