What Is It Like to Be Blind?
There are thousands of blind people in our country, and there are hundreds of thousands of them around the world. One can simply close his eyes in order to imagine what it is like to be blind. Such experiment is really the best way to understand how blind people feel and what they have to face in their daily life. The feelings I could experience after spending one hour with closed eyes touched me deeply. For some first minutes I was able only to make some slow and awkward movements, because I was quite scared of coming against the things around me.
Certainly, I got used to the environment soon, but it was still difficult to cope with the situation and decide, what to do. Then, I got a new angle on the issue. What about career, accomplishments, love, success, or hope? Suddenly, I realized how helpless and apathetic the blind can feel. I tried to walk around my house and even came out of it, but I constantly felt stressed and very uncomfortable. I could experience how hard it must be for blind people to perform their daily routines without meaningful help of a sighted guide.
Besides, it became clear to me that it takes more time and efforts of the blind to perform simple actions and operations, like turning on the oven or looking for the remote control, etc. Finally, I understood that, actually, the blind can not even do and enjoy many absolutely usual things we do and enjoy every day. They can not fully enjoy TV shows and movies like we can, can not read or surf Internet as fast as we can, and so on. Certainly, nowadays there are many technological solutions, which help blind people to read and write, or use computer, or stay organized, but it is still very complicated, I suppose.
Therefore, this experiment helped me to experience some difficulties of the blind and taste the effects of failures they can face. Certainly, within the time such people get adapted to their disability and learn what they can and what they can not do. But this is really hard, and I only wish all blind people to be strong, find their support and inspiration, and always use the power of their imagination in order to picture this world in bright and beautiful colors. Bibliography: • “What Is It Like to Be Blind? ” Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Chldren. Destra Business. 2007. 23 May 2007 <http://www. ridbc. org. au/resources/tobeblind. asp>.
