Life's little setbacks

While playing basketball two weeks ago, my team put me in charge of guarding a 500-pound opponent on the other team. “Big and tall!’ they commanded, and I jumped in the air and spread my hands wide to block him from receiving the ball, only to end up getting my finger bent backward by the basketball and the 500-pound man. “I’m OK,” I insisted, trying to appear tough in front of the guys, “I always keep my hand under my armpit like this. The pressure helps my circulation.”\nWhen I was alone again I collapsed into a fetal position and moaned profanities like a rabid cow. By the morning, my finger was purple. The doctor at health services took me into a room with fish painted on the walls, took an X-ray, and declared that my left hand’s middle finger was fractured.\nLeft hand’s middle finger: not a big loss, right? But after the doctor mounted my finger on a splint, he proceeded to wrap my entire left hand in gauze. I was instructed to leave it that way for 12 days. Apparently my fingers had formed a union against my knowledge. Left Middle Finger might have taken the brunt of the basketball, but the other fingers weren’t going to operate without him. (Thumb got to stay free, but Thumb has always kind of been the black sheep of the hand).\nThe first couple days were rough. I used the search-and-punch keyboard method of someone who was never taught how to type. I made a mess in the shower trying to squeeze out shampoo onto my right hand by pressing the bottle between my left wrist and my abs.\nBut soon my splint became my accomplice. I found satisfaction in stroking people in class with its cold, metal end and winking seductively when they stared at me curiously. Last week, as I sped past an annoyingly slow driver, I held up my left hand as though flipping him off, my splint raised above the middle section of my bandaged fingers.\nMy gauze became like the strong, but gentle, friend who you can look at and suddenly remember exactly where you’ve been. It was not a cast but a sheath of memories, full of the stains that defined the past two weeks of my life. As I unwrapped it one final time, I tenderly rubbed its familiar splotch of orange. “Taco night,” I remembered, “That was fun.”\nIn one scene in the movie “300,” a Spartan captain loses his eye in battle and the king asks him if the loss will hold him back. “It’s just an eye,” he responds. “The gods saw fit to grace me with a spare.”\nWe can get by on so much less than we’re given. The left hand is certainly useful in sculpting ponytails and buttoning pants. But on the other hand (pun intended) I have a new appreciation for headbands and drawstrings. Appreciate what you have and take nothing for granted. Challenge yourself to get by on less. Embrace and learn from all of life’s little setbacks.