This is the live story of a girl named Jessica, from Sierra Vista, Arizona, USA, who was born without hands. Jessica slowly learned to live her life with her feet. With the support of her parents and family, Jessica became confident in herself as an adult and continued to explore the world with her feet. As a child, Jessica had studied dance and she continued dancing for 14 years. At the age of 14, Jessica earned her first Black Belt in the International Taekwondo Federation. After graduating from high school, Jessica attended the University of Arizona where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Jessica’s most famous accomplishment was learning how to fly. She received the Guinness World Record for being the first person certified to fly an airplane with only their feet. Jessica now works as a motivational speaker. She travels all over the world sharing her story and encouraging people to be creative and innovative with the mantra, ‘Think outside the shoe.’
When similar stunning heroic stories of success pass by, I ask myself, ‘what are success and satisfaction? How is pain and suffering related?’ Satisfaction is defined as pleasure obtained from getting what you want and success is the achievement of something that you planned to do or attempted to do. However, I may not agree with the explanation on satisfaction, unless the word want is redefined, because wants need not go hand in hand with satisfaction. If the teachings of Siddhartha Buddha can be summarized into one sentence, it could be that desire is the cause of all miseries and desire simply means strong feeling of wanting something.
The truth that satisfaction is not proportional to the quantity we want/earn underlines the fact that satisfaction of being a king for the noble and having a simple own house for the poor could be the same by degrees. None of the congenital problems that Jessica had could hurt her. Sufferings were not pains to her. Finally, I came to the conclusion that if Jessica could be unhappy, it means that Nature has with it a rule of balance to help all sorts of people from all corners of the globe reach satisfaction. Wherever there is some imbalance as we see it, there definitely is the necessary balancing power hid behind. That should be the reason why Jessica says that the Great Universe is always merciful.
Joseph Mattappally
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