“Walk A Mile In My Shoes” is a popular proverb that has many variations such as: “You Can’t Understand Someone Until You have Walked A Mile In Their Shoes” or “Before You Judge Me, Walk A Mile In My Shoes“. The proverb is believed to have roots to Native American tribes and an 1895 poem by Mary T.
It is very natural for people to feel as it they can relate to what others are going through. Although people generally mean well in their efforts to try and empathize with a person’s situation, at best they can only offer sympathy unless they have personally gone through the same experience or have been closely connected to someone that has or is currently dealing with a challenging situation, such as a disability.
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 15% of the world’s population lives with some form of disability that they are either born with or that developed through acquired conditions.
Many years ago I had a friend who was bound to a wheelchair, however, he was not born with a medical condition that warranted the need for a wheelchair. Rather, he was shot in the back while trying to defend a friend and consequently became a paraplegic. One of the many things that I admired about him was his positive outlook on life which was a result of him choosing to do the mental, emotional and spirtual work to heal. Many of us may hope that being a paraplegic will never become our fate. However, sometimes their are events that happen in our lives that may lead to this condition or another medical condition that may temporarily leave us with the inability to walk which actually happened to me.
“Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms”….. Sterling K. Brown
In October 0f 2023, I was unexpectedly hospitalized due to two medical conditions: Deep Vein Thrombosis and Pulmary Emolism. In additonal to these to medical conditions, I also had influenza. My medical conditions left me hospitalized for nearly the entire month of october. Additionally, during the inital part of my stay I was bed bound and unable to walk. However, as I worked with physcial and occupational therapists, I was gradually able to progress to a wheelchair, a walker and eventually to the point where I was eventually able to walk again without any support.
There were several times throughout my healing journey that I became extremely emotional. The first time was when I transitioned from the hospital bed to the wheelchair. The reason why it was so emotional for me was because the wheelchair had given me a sense of freedom and independence (as it had become an extension of me). But has helpful as the wheelchair had become for me, I soon realized the challenges of trying to navigate through life in a different way.
The second time that I became extremely emotional, was when I was finally able to without again without any support.
The ability to walk is a “socially embedded and shaped biological adaptation”. However, sometimes, there are injuries or medical conditions that my inhibit a person’s ability to walk. The ability to touch, see, hear, smell and taste, are five basic human senses that sends information to our brain that helps us to better connect with the world around us. Unfortunately, sense the majority of us are born with these basic human senses in tact, oftentimes we take them for granted unless something drastic happens in our lives that results in our having a different type of experience.
“There is no greater disability in society, than the inability to see a person as more”.
“…Robert M. Hensel
Jane Elliott is an internationally known American diversity educator who was made famous through her “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise”, which she first conducted with her third grade class on april 5, 1968 the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
As part of the exercise, Elliott, divided her class into two groups (those with Blue Eyes and those with Brown Eyes). The students with the Blue Eyes were regarded as better, smarter and more superior and also were rewarded with perks while the students with the Brown Eyes were regarded as inferior and treated poorly. Elliott also reversed the experiment on the children and also had them to record their experience. Elliott’s experiment was also recorded as a documentary and she also conducted exericises with college students as well as became a full-time public speaker against discrimination.
Although Elliott’s passion lead to a career change, there are many ways that people can Jane Elliott’s anti-racism exercise was indeed a profound way to “walk in the shoes” of another. However, their are many practical ways that we can place ourselves in someone else shoes by simply listening to others, acknowledging their pain and allowing them to be vulnerable.
REFERENCES:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34421710/
