Bag of Hammers

There's a story about a group of people standing around in a circle. God asks each of them to take out their biggest problem and place it in the center, and then he tells everyone to choose from the pile and pick up whichever problem they'd want. They all choose the original problem they'd placed in the circle.

Michael J. Fox told that story in an interview I watched. He was different, his Parkinson's disease is more obvious now, though some symptoms subsided a bit when he excused himself for a few minutes to take another pill. His face is less animated, his smile is only a reflection of what it used to be, and the involuntary twitching of his limbs cannot be completely controlled as they were when I saw him on television a couple of years ago. He said that sometimes now he has facial contortions that will freeze his face in a twisted grimace for half an hour or more, and how he has to put his mind in a different place and wait out the paralysis and the pain it causes. But then he said this:

"Having this disease is a gift." He said that it's a gift because when you have lost something, you see just how much you have gained in life and how much you still have. He talked about how grateful he was to have been able to do the work he loved, and for all the relationships he's had in life that mean so much to him.

"We all have a bag of hammers," Michael Fox said. God, may I always see how light my bag has been compared to many, may I see the gift in the ones I have, and may I always be concerned about the hammers all your children carry.