On Helen Keller

"Life is either a great adventure or nothing."
- Helen Keller

I see this quote on FB frequently and it always makes me feel guilty. My life is certainly not a great adventure. I have not jumped off a cliff lately (either with a parachute or into water). I do not participate in extreme sports. I only leave my apartment when I am forced to by some necessity. Therefore, by HK's logic, my life is nothing. I'm not sure I would disagree with that but I might put it a little less forcefully.

But like all things that hang around in my brain long enough, I eventually got around to thinking about that quote. What kind of adventures did Helen Keller get up to? I doubt she was a para-glider, nor can I see her smuggling a secret code over enemy lines. I am not going to turn this into a cheap HK joke. Her disabilities (am I still allowed to call them that?) require me to reconsider my initial reaction to her eminently meme-ish sentence.

Life is either a great adventure [to you] or nothing [very exciting]. It isn't as punchy, I'll admit. But I think it is closer to what the sentence means. Read this way it is less an injunction to "Do something that scares you everyday" - another popular injunction for either self-improvement or selling running shoes - and more a suggestion about how one should consider one's life.

I generally mistrust famous quotes from famous people because extreme cases make bad laws and famous people are extreme cases by definition.

Here's another one: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." - M. Gandhi

I've always thought this quote was absolute bullshit. It makes no sense. And it is stupid, something Gandhi wasn't. How, precisely, is a single mother making $16k a year with two kids supposed to "be the change"? How are the millions of people living in desperate poverty supposed to "Be the change"?

What Gandhi actually said was:

"If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him... We need not wait to see what others do."

That's a much more nuanced view than Be The Change. It also makes sense. Maybe I should give HK more credit. Maybe the Life is... quote is nothing more than a fabrication deliberately meant to sell cars or shoes or the organic shopping experience.