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If you didn’t read my column last weekend, which was pegged to Easter, I hope you’ll do so now, here. It’s about the young lieutenant governor of the state of Washington, Cyrus Habib, who went blind at 8, graduated from Columbia University, won a Rhodes scholarship, got a Yale law degree and made a big splash in politics, then decided that his ambition was consuming him. He recently announced that he would leave office later this year to begin the roughly 10-year process to become a full-fledged Jesuit priest.
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Because of space constraints, there was much about Habib that I didn’t get to share in the column. For instance, I mentioned his trek last year to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro but not his revelatory, gorgeous explanation of what a blind climber experiences in lieu of a conventionally defined view.
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“You feel it,” Habib told me. “You feel the whole world dropping away. I have a sense of spatiality, based on acoustics and maybe even other types of senses that I can’t scientifically describe. I can feel when I’m in a huge cathedral. I can feel when I’m in a small bedroom.” At the top of Kilimanjaro, he said, “It felt to me like I was on the moon, because of the thinness of the air. You’re kind of high — lightheaded — and you feel this sense of vastness that’s not just around you but also below you. You can feel it in your body.”
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Habib told me that I could learn more about how senses beyond sight interpret extraordinary landscapes by reading “Touch the Top of the World,” by Erik Weihenmayer, a blind man who has accomplished the rare feat of reaching the highest peaks on all seven continents. Habib said that it’s no accident that Weihenmayer uses the word “touch” in the title of his memoir.
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Separately, Habib asserted that modern politics and cultural mores often work against their own goals when it comes to marginalized Americans. He said that they mean to tell someone like him that his disability shouldn’t define him, but then they tuck him into an interest group — a category — in a way that does precisely that.
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Articulating a perspective that many others would surely disagree with, he said that the emphasis on the pride that each marginalized person should embrace can discourage the welter of emotions, negative as well as positive, that some people work through.
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“It becomes difficult to establish a space in which I can say, ‘I really wish I weren’t blind, this is the cross that I bear,’” Habib told me. “Because of my loving parents, because of programs funded by society, because of public schools, because of God’s help, because of technology and innovation, it’s not a heavy cross.”
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But, he added, it’s a cross nonetheless — “If someone said I could take a pill and not be blind anymore, I’d do it,” he told me — and he said that only recently, when he decided to stop trying to achieve, achieve, achieve, could he fully acknowledge deprivation and, as he put it, tend to his wound.
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