When you’re 17-years-old and told you’re going blind, you ignore it. That’s what I did when I was first diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP). And why not? I could see just fine at the time.

I’ve noticed that I’m not alone in waiting to the last minute to prepare for a storm. After all, I live in South Florida and have ridden on the backs of several hurricanes. Whenever a big one is approaching, I hear the buzz saws and the hammering, though everyone knows that is not the best time to install shutters. The best time to do that is before hurricane season begins. Most of us are last minute people.

It appears that the nature of Human nature is to wait to take action on a vital predicament until we actually experience it firsthand – not until something pricks us to wake up and act.

It’s no surprise that folks who refuse to wear a mask during our present pandemic have not been infected with the coronavirus, nor has anyone in their immediate sphere been infected – a parent, sibling, friend, or neighbor. They haven’t been rife with fever, fatigue, nausea and shortness of breath caused by the virus and remain psychologically numb to the reality of it. Some even deny its existence.

England’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn’t seriously address the pandemic in his country until he got sick with COVID-19. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s cavalier attitude to the coronavirus, seen smiling and shaking hands with citizens while infections were dramatically rising in Brazil, made a 180 degree turn once testing positive for the coronavirus, even donning a mask when announcing his condition on state TV.

People tend to act only when infected themselves, or come within 6 degrees of the thing, or come face-to-face with it before slapping on a mask.

Some of us even wait until what we’ve encountered gets pretty bad before taking serious measures to mitigate the problem. Besides a little night blindness at first, I literally paid no attention to my deteriorating condition, even after I crossed the line into my 30s. Totally blind by then, I was depending on other people to get around. Still I had no strategy to investigate the available tools to better deal with my compromised world. It was not until I was in my 40s that I sought independence through assistive tech and wound up on the campus of a guide dog school.

What prompted me into action?

I was a businessman that kept my notes on two different micro-cassette recorders, going back and forth between them to crunch my daily notes and to-do list. It was labor intensive. Then I met John, a blind grad student, who put a little box with seven keys in my hands. It was an electronic Braille notetaker. Since I was a serious knucklehead and had never learned to type, I figured it would be easier to master seven buttons rather than the 26-plus keys of a keyboard. But what actually resonated more in my bones was the fact that John was headed off to team up with his first guide dog before beginning a doctoral program in assistive technology. I asked him why a guide dog? He said he wanted to be able to walk around campus with “more dignity.” Dignity. Hmm. I hadn’t been feeling very dignified moving about my world for too many years.

Another Aha! moment was connecting with Alice, a client at the Lighthouse for the Blind, who was off to get her first guide dog as well. She mentioned that her 5-year-old daughter was starting to feel responsible for her and she didn’t want that sort of relationship with her young daughter to continue. I had a 5-year-old daughter at the time who was starting to feel responsible for me. Off to dog school I went.

I got my first guide dog, Recon, and started moving independently through my world, obtained a Braille notetaker, a PC and a screenreader, and my possibilities exploded. I could write, read and edit documents by myself and my time became my own; I didn’t have to wait for others to assist me in getting out-and-about and doing the stuff of life.

Sure, I could have begun doing better 25 years earlier, but it took a couple of blows to the head to see the light, so to speak.

More daunting than tackling an internal challenge can be addressing external forces. Proximity plays a role here. The more distant you are from a crisis, the less you are likely to react to it. It's possible to live in a blissful bubble, denying, for example, climate change because things just haven’t gotten hot enough for us.

The challenge always remains how to light the collective fuse for doing the good and right thing; how to bring it home. Beyond the tendency to wait till the last minute to put up the shutters, we would all be well served to lean more mightily into what is happening around us; seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, touching it, thinking more deeply about it, bringing us far closer to acting for the betterment of ourselves, others and the planet.

Since we can’t be everywhere things happen, photos, video and audio recordings do help spark action. The images of George Floyd's last moments lit a collective fuse and ignited a meaningful nationwide response. Seeing is believing, minimizing the effect of doubt and spin.

It is the actions of individual people who collectively improve the wider world. We must bristle a little first and let the outrage build inside us until momentum drives us to act. We can choose to sit back in the bleachers and be a spectator or get onto the field and compete – we can’t win if we don’t play.

Of course, it is folly to think that all people can be stirred into action, especially without direct experience. And the deeper we must dig to motivate our actions, fewer still will join the fight. We can only hope that the majority of us are willing to dig deep enough to identify and overwhelm the problem well before we approach the edge of a cliff. We can limit the spread of coronavirus with a mask, recycle plastics before they reach our majestic oceans, stop accelerating the melting of the polar caps by reducing our carbon footprint.

Taking action without being in the direct path of the problem is a heavy lift. Yet, lifting up ourselves and others is when we are at our best.

Steve Gladstone

The Blind Dude