The Crucible

For those of you who may not know, I lost my left leg in October - I wrote about it here. 

Today I “walked" home with a new leg. Seeing two feet in action flooded my brain with positive signals.

The process of moving from an amputation to a functioning prosthetic leg is not strait forward. It’s a collaboration between your body, the technology and your brain. Each needs to be adjusted and it takes several iterations before it starts to work right. 

Of course I have huge expectations for myself and fully plan on returning to every activity I enjoyed before I became sick. In the meantime, I remain humbled by the process and grateful for the outcomes to date. 

Warren Bennis  once wrote in the the introduction to his classic, On Becoming a Leader, “…I discovered that their leadership always emerged after some rite of passage, often a stressful one…The individual brings certain attributes into the crucible and emerges with new, improved leadership skills. Whatever is thrown at them, leaders emerge from their crucibles stronger and unbroken.”

I hope what Warren says holds true for me as well.  I hope all my experiences  - especially the really difficult ones - make me better. 

An industrial process for making steel using a Bessemer converter to blast air through molten iron in a giant crucible thus burning the excess carbon and impurities- the first successful method of making steel in quantity at low cost