A long time ago I made up a saying: The size of your world is inversely proportionate to the size of your worries. In other words, small world = big worries. Big world = smaller worries.
The thing is, I enjoy my solitary time just as much as I love spending time with my husband and a few favorite local friends. If I'm always in my own neighborhood, though, my only access to the outside world is through television. Unfortunately, 90% of what I see on the TV roster are violent shows and movies (about guns and murder), news (a virtual obituary), and nature documentaries (animals ripping each other apart).
I need to see a bigger world filled with good people and beautiful scenery in order to travel outside my head. I need to stand on top of a mountain so I can see all the way to the horizon. That's the kind of travel I'd been doing all my life, and the one my husband and I dreamed of continuing after his retirement. When his stroke came seven months later, though, travel no longer created the sense of freedom that it used to.
On one out-of-town trip, my husband was a virtual shut-in at the hotel because of a convention that blocked hallways and crowded the elevators, making it hard for him to balance with his cane. (Who knew that guide dogs would prefer to sniff out the competition rather than lead their masters?)
We've noticed differing attitudes toward handicaps in the places we've visited. In some areas, like larger cities, people have been impatient with my husband's slowness, darting past him to doors without holding them open. In most locations, though, he seems to get the royal treatment. We're both touched by that kindness, and inspired by the compassion we see all around us.
In the year and a half after my husband's stroke, we seemed to be on a journey of trial and error, with a determination to improve our mutual joy. For eight years prior to the stroke, we hiked all over the Southwest, from Colorado to Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. In an effort to not tease ourselves with hiking locations after the stroke, though, we tried places where he could use his mobility scooter while I walked beside him.
We went to Tucson, Arizona instead of our favorite hiking paradise, Sedona, because it's extremely handicapped-friendly with miles and miles of paved pathways around the entire city. That trip was a step up from our drive through quaint and hilly villages, though, because uneven sidewalks, steep inclines and steps made it impossible for my husband to go inside the antique shops and galleries.
His primary challenges were physical, though I have no doubt the emotional part was a close second. My challenge was that I crave exertion and missed it terribly. Although I've tried a few nature hikes with friends, it wasn't the same as exploring new places with my formerly favorite hiking buddy.
After each trip, we talked about what we liked and didn't like, and what we might want to try in the future. Still, I missed our yearly trips to Sedona, and the challenge of hiking up the steep rocks, but I did my best to be enthusiastic about walking alongside my husband's scooter in the kinds of larger towns and cities neither of us preferred in the past.
On our last day in Tucson, though, my husband had a realization at the same time as I was lamenting a year without hiking the beautiful red rocks of Sedona. He said, "Tucson was okay, but I'd rather be bored in Sedona, sitting on a back porch there reading a book as long as I could occasionally look up and see those red rocks in the distance."
What joy I felt! And how timely it was because I had come to my own realization simultaneously. I would rather hike alone through the red rocks of Sedona as my morning exercise, just as I love my daily walks through my own neighborhood. And in the afternoons? That's when my husband and I could go out for tea, to an antique store or a thrift shop to enjoy our quality time exploring together.
It made me realize that we'd probably been looking too far outside our realm of joy for that perfect adaptive vacation. The irony, it turned out, was that the best way to adapt travel to our new lives was to simply do what we've loved all along, with the only real change being the scenery.
That, after all, is how you take a small world and make it bigger.
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