We often meet charismatic and fascinating persons. If you think well it is not so rare to bump into outstanding individuals.
I am right now watching the TV, listening former President Carter smiling in a press conference where he is explaining about his brain cancer and I can’t believe how this man finds the strength to be so positive and optimistic about life even in the day he is going to start his chemotherapy. One of the journalists just President Carter how he feels and he replied with an amazingly “I feel good”.
We at ENGAGE never ever had the opportunity to meet in person President Carter but we recently had the luck to meet another incredible individual. He is not a former president and he is only twenty five years old.
Speaking of himself, he said that before his life changed abruptly back in 2011 he was not a so good guy: “I was aggressive and he was really tough guy”. I believe his words and I guess he was someone you would not like to mess around with.
It was then 2011, the bus he was riding in Jhapa fell down the road and his life had a real “U Turn” and he says it was for better. After struggling to find a new normalcy in a wheelchair, he shares he is now a better person.
Because of that accident he is now a transformed person, a person who lost for good his aggressiveness and ways of doing and now he is trying his best to inspire other people that like him had to face the same dramatic “U Turn” that led them in a wheelchair.
I would say a U Turn for good. You surely need guts to express such strong comments about life because if you are able to share your thoughts in this way, you are simply an example of sheer inspiration and determination.
Ladies and gentlemen, the ENGAGE Team had the honor to meet during a recent trip to Chitwan, Mr Sameer Thakur, a young man in full strengths and with an amazing spirit who works as peer counseling within the spinal injury rehabilitation unit of the local district hospital in Bharatpur.
We were simply blown away by Sameer’s story and by the way he was telling us about how his life changed after that dramatic bus incident.
It took more than one and half year for Sameer to recover physically and psychologically and he found strength out of desperation, the same desperation that enlightened him to take the best out of this new life, a life only apparently worst than what had had before.
How can a person stuck in a wheelchair feel “blessed” by the curse that made him paralyzed? It seems really crazy think such way and after all only if you go through it, you can ultimately understand his willpower.
A wheelchair offered Sameer an opportunity to introspect and reflect about his life and was a medium to find a new purpose.
Maybe the Sameer before the accident was aggressive because he had not discovered yet his ultimate mission in life. Tragically the destiny was hard on him and pushed him down the road in a painful journey that turned him able to find value out of a different life.
Think of how many of us live and experience their lives without any clear purpose. What I am referring here when I talk about purpose is not about turning yourself in a superman or wonderwoman, in a Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa. For me a life with purpose is simply being able to find the strength to pursue your passion and do what you love most.
Not many persons have the luck to enjoy their works, often you really have to push yourself hard to keep going and you really do it because at the end of the month you need to have earned something to survive but then, besides work, the same persons find many other ways to fulfill themselves: someone devotes her time reading or coaching a basketball team, others become members of a local association, others join political parties or labor unions at local level.
There are many ways for a person to find a passion, something you enjoy doing and Sameer found his own.
He understood that he had to something to get out of depression and frustration. He was bold enough to persuade the managers of the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Center, SIRC, where he was treated, to consider him as a candidate for peer counseling in Chitwan.
Sameer had the guts to ask for a chance: he admitted that he was a terrible patient; he was always angry and upset, fighting with everybody there.
Certainly Sameer was not at peace with himself at that time. He was an improbable candidate for the position but somehow he went through a competitive process and he showed his talents, his strengths and a sheer willpower to start again a new. Sameer realized that a life in wheelchair offered him a new purpose, a huge one.
Sameer, an example of determination, optimism and hope; Sameer exactly like President Carter, a person capable of remaining confident and self assured in critical times; a person with immense resilience and capacity to adopt and thrive despite the odds.
The world we live in needs these heroes, desperately. There are our new role models, persons who are not afraid of living their lives amazingly.
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