I Live a Life Like Yours
Jan Grue
Translated by B. L. Crook
Having read it
★★★★☆
Life-affirming, compelling and rewarding in showing that one person’s experience and perspective on life are relevant and can be helpful to society understanding that more should be done to include, on many levels (real and metaphorical!) as the efforts will allow more to be included, cost less in the long run and involve less compartmentalising of everything as if that’s some form of success and progress – life is beautiful in its shades of grey.
These words sum up (the writing) purpose:
With these words, with this book, I am creating a space in the world. If I succeed, I will be recreating a part of the world, my part, with this book, with these words.
A good passage
To be a child is to be blind to one’s self, it is to be unfettered in the world. To exist in the eyes of others is to be visible. Having to see one’s self from the outside is having to gain control over one’s self.
A second good passage
I think of the Buddhist monk in the parable, the one who refuses to label single events as lucky or unlucky, who ever only says: We’ll see. My diagnosis was gone, and what remained was the freedom to be able to say about the future: We’ll see.
A third good passage
From that period of half a year, during which I depended on my wheelchair almost exclusively, and when every single step was painful and merely a means to an end, something grew. It’s not true that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; on the contrary, whatever doesn’t take your life can make you humbler, more willing to acknowledge your vulnerability. I hope this is what happened to me.