Mark Twain said, “Travel is the greatest cure for prejudice.”

This past fall I did a three-month tour of our educational program Nametags, and screenings of our documentary One Revolution. My goal with Nametags, like Twain’s travel, is to tweak people’s perspective just a little bit so that they see things differently. My goal was to tweak the students’ perspective, but funny how quickly that was turned on me.

It was a warm October afternoon in Jackson, Mississippi, about two-thirds of the way through our tour. After about 50 Nametags presentations I felt I could handle anything, but this could be a little different. I’d been warned that Murrah High School was an almost all black school. I didn’t exactly know what to make of that knowledge. We didn’t go through the metal detector when we entered the school, but I noticed it.

Even in his suit the principal looked like a former athlete. The grey flannel didn’t hide the broad shoulders. His hand swallowed mine when we shook. He introduced me to the 900 students in the auditorium like he was giving them a gift. I could see that he saw his job to give them gifts—the gifts of education and possibility.

I asked the students if they were willing to help me with our motto. They were. One side chanted, “It’s not what happens to you.” The other answered, “It’s what you do with what happens to you.” Nice, I thought, they’re on my side. I flipped the third slide.

“What do these people have in common? I asked.

It’s a slide of some of the most influential people in our history: Edison, Einstein, Da Vinci, Mozart, Agatha Christie, Ann Bancroft, Churchill, Cher, Tom Cruise, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Beethoven.

“I’ll take three answers. We’ll do the handraising thing, please,” fully expecting the usual answers.

“They’re successful.”

“They’re famous,”

“They changed the way that we see the world.”

All of those answers are true, but the answers lead me to the twist. All of these famous, successful, world changing people had one learning disabilities—dyslexia, auspurgers syndrome. I waited for my opportunity, when the first girl surprised me.

“They’re all of Western European descent,” she said. I’d never heard this answer. She was about three-quarters of the way up the auditorium.

I repeated, “They’re all of Western European descent?” I asked making sure that I had it right, when a boy a couple of rows in front of her yelled out, “They’re all white.”

Oh no, I thought. I’ve just lost them. We’ve only begun and I’ve lost them. Who am I as some middle-aged white guy to tell them about perspective?

“Okay, right. You are totally right and I’ve never noticed that before. I’ve done this presentation hundreds of times and I’d never noticed. Hmm, this really is great. The intention of this slide is make you see these successful, famous people differently because they had all had one form of learning disability. Their struggles pushed them to see the world differently and to change for the better the way that we see the world,”

“But it’s also about perspective. How often do we take what we see around us as the world as a whole? It never even occurred to me that there were no black people on this slide, or as you pointed out that everyone was white.”

I worried that I might lose them, but they stuck with me.

Many years ago I was training or preparing to train in my racing chair in New York City. I pushed up 8th Avenue hoping not to get run over when the people on the street started to cheer for me. My first thought was how ridiculously condescending. I’m not doing anything worthy of cheering. Are they cheering that I got off the couch, out of my house? Then I realized that their cheers were well intended. I gave them the thumbs up of thanks and I realized that everyone cheering me was one form of minority or another. The white people on that street wouldn’t even look at me.

For twenty years I’d been a white male. Suddenly in a moment, one turn on the mountain that went horribly wrong, I’d broken my back and become a minority. I was on the outside looking in. My perspective changed that day in New York because I saw what it was like to be on the outside, to be disenfranchised. Maybe I’d sensed that my accident had pushed me to the periphery, but this was personal. I was on the outside and I hadn’t acknowledged it.

How could I be so blind? Because, in my world, I wasn’t on the outside. My accident hadn’t changed my interaction with my friends, but it did change my perspective. In strangers I often saw the best and most generous in some people and the worst and most condescending in others. The strangers don’t know me so they treat me like a stereotype. That’s why we travel, so that we might see the person instead of the stereotype. I’m happy to say that I kept the attention of those 900 kids for the full presentation. Maybe they too realized that as a result of my accident I had a perspective that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

The air was crisp this morning in downtown Portland, Maine. People zipped up fall jackets. Gone was the thick, wet air I’d experienced earler in the week up north in the Belfast area. Fall is coming. Apparently, I didn’t get the memo as left the Hilton Garden Inn across from the ferry in a sleeveless Lycra suit for a workout around the bay. The bight sun warmed me quickly as I left the shadows. The permanency of New England is it’s beauty to me–the old bridges and rocks on the craggy coastal landscape with sparkling sea and cloudless sky.

It’s been quite a week. I’ve seen old friends and met new ones. We’ve hit Maasacusetts, Vermont and Maine so far, presenting to approximately 5,00 students and showing the film four times to packed houses. The Fay School even scheduled a return showing October 1st.

The pace has been crazy. I seem to have been either presenting talking to people or driving, though there’s been a bit of time to sleep and workout on an almost daily basis. I’m off to New York for a panel discussion at the UN tomorrow. While the pace has been crazy, I’ve loved the perpetual motion and connecting with the students. I’m off for now, but hope to write more when I get off my phone and onto my computer later today.

Often, the greatest gifts come out of crisis. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I remember the most remarkable scene that I saw in the aftermath. When the towers came down, most ran away, but a select few ran to save those who remained inside. In a town with people who will hold a door for you, but won’t look you in the eye or acknowledge your “thanks,” people helped each other, they saw each other, and they came together.

One Revolution’s motto is, “It’s not what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you.” The goal is resilience, which sounds like being tough enough to endure, but our collective perception doesn’t account for how what happens to us can be the greatest gift. Our tour started last week. We visited four schools and showed the movie twice. Driving from New Hampshire to Vermont, I wondered what I would see as a result of Hurricane Irene. I wondered about closed roads. I didn’t anticipate the positively changed lives.

At Crossett Middle School in Waterbury, Vermont, students and teachers were hit hard. The principal told me how his house and neighborhood were completely demolished by the flood, but that wasn’t the remarkable part of the story. When the waters retreated, he returned home to clean, only to find a woman that he didn’t know already cleaning the furniture in his yard. This woman, a French Canadian on vacation with her boyfriend, decided to help people that she didn’t even know. There were tons of stories like this. People helping people they didn’t even know. Like with 9/11, sometimes crisis shows us the best in people.

At almost every Nametags presentation, a student asks me if through some miracle of time travel I could return to the day of the accident, would I prevent the accident. Obviously, I can’t change something that happened in the past, but I don’t want to either. I wouldn’t change the experiences that I have had or the person that I’ve become for the ability to walk. Sometimes we need to crisis to show us the best in others and in ourselves.

The start of the tour has been great to see so many old friends, to see the tremendous reaction to the film and to play some spectacular venues in Stowe and Waitsfield, Vermont. Even though we’ve now done more than 150 of the Nametags presentations, I learn something every time. To make a point with one group I asked, “We’re taught from the time we’re little that we can do whatever want, aren’t we?” In my mind the question was mostly rhetorical, but a fair number of the students answered, “No.” I hope that we’ve changed their minds, and I hope that we can all see that as difficult as tragedy can be, some of the greatest gifts come out of the worst moments.

Today is the first day of school at the Brookwood School in Machester, Mass. It feels like my first day to as Brookwood is the first stop on our ten-week tour. I’m filled with anticipation and excitement tinged with nervousness. I’m sure I share these emotions with the first day students. What will this year bring? What will the next ten weeks bring for me?

It’s a rainy beginning with a daunting, circumlocuted route on what surely are former cow paths now paved and numbered roads from Hampton, NH to Manchester.

It’s a chest constricting, clock ticking, new shoes (thanks Keen for your sponsorship), that thing I forgot race to the front door of the school. Like the students, it’s a race to get started, otherwise, it’s just the excitement and anticipation tinged with nervousness. Let’s get started

I’ve thought a lot about changing modes of transportation especially as we embark on designing a developing countries handcycle, but the thought is a lot different when it’s personal. Unlike the people we’re trying to help, I don’t have to crawl on the floor or in the dirt. In fact, I rarely encounter anything that I can’t do. Sure climbing the grassy ski hill in my everyday chair for a Wednesday concert at Deer Valley is a challenge. There’s the inevitable flight of stairs and there was the glass bottle of olive oil on the top shelf at the supermarket the other day. I was sure had everything under control as I flipped it up from the bottom and caught it on the way down, but right there in the middle was a moment of worry.

It occurred to me a couple of days ago that the difference between being on the ground and getting around in a handcycle isn’t so much about assisted movement but a different plane of movement—a sense of freedom. As epiphanies often go, it occurred to me in a totally personal way. A good friend asked me to join him and his boys at the pool of the gym—not so much at the pool as the structure behind it. He’d been talking about brachiating on the metal rings since he arrived this summer—and the monkey bars that climbed in a 45-degree angle—and the climbing rope and the fireman’s pole.

The monkey bars were the monkey bars—a lot like doing pull-ups. Climbing the rope tendered a kind of freedom as I quickly left my chair far below. But the rings were transformational. I watched Bob’s kids try the rings, other kids and Bob himself. Their attempts all ended the same, with a bailout into the sand. When my friend Steve and his kids joined us, there was a chance that I could try because the rings were probably ten feet off the ground. With the two of them they could lift me.

I grabbed with both hands and they swung me toward the other ring, when I grabbed it I started pulling hard with my right hand in the opposite direction to maximize my swing toward the next ring, which I grabbed and repeated the process, moving quickly across space. I went four or five before I started to think that there was no eject button for me. Landing in the sand wouldn’t end well for me, so I cut the joy short for the safety of my chair. But in that moment I moved, really moved, moved on an entirely different plane, one that I comprehended kinesthetically, but couldn’t understand in the context of my experience. That was the intoxicating part—an entirely new context.

For a long time I’ve thought that I’d love to have a spiral staircase with handholds underneath so that I could climb that very same staircase with my hands. I haven’t worked out the landing part, which would be important. Maybe I need to check out some Escher drawings. The rings and the spiral staircase show some creativity versus a ramp. A ramp is just an afterthought—a crude accommodation with no sense of aesthetic. A ramp is like putting jeans on Michelangelo’s David. There’s nothing beautiful about a ramp, just something tacked on when necessity trumps aesthetic.

As I went out for my workout today I thought about changing that plane of perspective and movement. I liked moving in a different way and can’t wait to do it again. I’m sure I’ll go the whole length of the rings the next time. I also thought, could I design a house that would allow me to move freely—not a house designed for walking people with after market afterthoughts, but one that used the beautiful space and movement. I think I’d call it anti-gravity, which might not make any sense, but it does in my mind. That’s what I hope for the people we’re trying to help—a vehicle that makes sense in time, space and movement, and escapes that pull of gravity.