Joshua Prager uses his journalistic eye to tell his own story at TED2013. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Almost twenty-three years ago, Joshua Prager experienced a moment that could only be described as “a great hinge in my life,” one that divided it “like the spine of an open book.” Just 19 years old then, Prager was in Israel for a year after high school. He was sitting in the backseat of a minibus bound for Jerusalem when a truck behind him lost control and slammed into the corner where he sat. His neck broke and, in a second, he went from an athletic teen to a hemiplegic. It would be weeks before he could breathe on his own, four months before he would leave the hospital. For the next four years, he navigated the world in a wheelchair, then a cane and braces – and embarked on a career as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal.

Joshua Prager: In search of the man who broke my neckIn today’s talk, given at TED2013, Prager tells the story of going back to Jerusalem to try to find the man who had been driving that truck: Abed.

“[He was] a man I never met, but who had changed my life,” says Prager in this wrenching talk. “So on an overcast morning in January, I headed north in a silver Chevy to find a man – and some peace.”

Prager had returned to live in Jerusalem once before, after college. While there, he’d read Abed’s testimony from the morning after the accident and felt an intense wave of emotion.

“It was the first time I’d felt anger toward this man and it came from magical thinking. On this Xeroxed sheet of paper the crash had not yet happened,” says Prager. “Abed could still turn his wheel left so I would see him whoosh by out my window … and I would remain whole.”

He contacted Abed on that trip, but the two didn’t meet. It was only last year — as Prager wrote a book about his experience — that he realized he needed to meet Abed face-to face. “Finally I understood why,” says Prager. “To hear this man say two words: I’m sorry.”

To hear how Prager found Abed, watch this talk. In it, he shares the unexpected trajectories this meeting took — and the lessons this unpredictable encounter taught him about human nature and the core of our identities.

Of course, Prager was only able to tell a sliver of his story in an18-minute talk. He shares much, much more in his book Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. Below, two excerpts from this recently released book – one from the prologue and one short selection from later.

Through the faded blue metal frame of my open window, I watch the morning light approach. It crests the skinny cypress trees atop the hill just over the valley, rolls down the bone rooftops of Jabal Mukabbir, rises to ripen the red-yellow nectarines on my sill three stories above Naomi Street. My floor, tiles of salmon and olive, brightens, and my glass tabletop reflects the worn copy of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly upon it.

The light reminds me that I have just come back to Jerusalem and I smile at a thought: “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.” I appropriated the sentence long ago from the Psalmist and I slide my left foot into my plastic brace, calf-high and erect in an empty brown shoe. I take hold of my wooden cane and walk to the staircase. There is no handrail on my right so I descend the three flights slowly, right forearm pressed against the powdery concrete wall, left hand unable to grasp the banister available to it, left leg — hard to bend–preceding the right down each of 55 steps.

I turn right on Naomi Street, right again on Hebron. My left foot is closer to the street than my right. Sidewalks the world over slant down toward the gutter and I am careful to give the extra smidgeon of clearance the slope affords to the half of me that swings forward from the hip. I have now done so for half my life.

Before May 16, 1990, I had not noticed the slant underfoot. Nor, as I ran over rise and fall, had I contemplated much what made me me, or that unfairness has theological implications, or that life might end each and every day.

But right now, because my neck broke, I am carrying a question to a windmill aware not only of the topography of the stone molars below but also, as every day, of these higher burdens.

And yet, I am lucky. Twenty-two years ago, at the base of the hill that rises to Jerusalem, a careless truck driver almost killed me as I sat in the back of a minibus. He would have but for the machines and people and tubes that saw to it that my body breathed and fed and pissed. A medical jet flew me home to New York where at age 19, I quietly observed the goings-on; I could not speak or move or feel anything below my neck save one well placed prick of a needle.

Improbably, the swelling in my neck receded. I would walk in the land of the living! But imbalanced. My right side moved freely. My left, restrained by spasticity, a neurological tightness of sorts, did not; it furled and shook. A doctor explained that I was further divided: I had Brown-Séquard syndrome which roughly meant that one half of me could move better, the other half feel.

I told myself to work now and think later. And so I pushed myself, learned to eat and dress and steady a suppository in spastic fingers, to sit and stand and walk. Walking, however gratifying, was at any real length an impractical exhaustion, and I used a wheelchair for four years until, back in Israel after college, I put in another year of exercise and rose from the chair for good. I returned to New York and became a journalist, walking through six continents with an ankle brace and cane, typing articles and a book with one finger.

I tried to write of the crash but failed. Instead, for a decade, I wrote of secrets. There was the reclusive boy who inherited the royalties to the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon. There was the hidden scheme that led to baseball’s most famous moment, The Shot Heard Round the World. There was the only-ever anonymous recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a photographer in Iran. There were the unknown suicides of the parents of the most famous missing person in World War II.

It took a friend to point out to me the obvious: all of these stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that changed in an instant — owing if not to a crash than to an inheritance, a swing of a bat, a click of a shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I had been working through my lot after all.

A second friend helped me to see that I was, in effect, forcing my subjects — one solved secret at a time — to live with their altering moment just as I did: openly. Whereas a depressed person can choose to conceal her disability, to meet me is to see that I use a cane.

But as I continue now on my walk and turn left onto King David, I am less sure of what I, not others, see in me and my broken neck.

I have returned to Jerusalem to find this out, to become again whole where I was once divided.

I cross to the right side of the street so that my left leg is to the curb and I see the windmill ahead amidst cypress and carob and olive trees. It is beautiful, a narrowing white stone cylinder with an iron cap and sail. A wealthy Brit named Moses Montefiore had it built in 1857 to encourage Jews to leave the safe but confined walled city just over the valley and support themselves milling flour. Though a community rooted about the mill, the mill was not used for long.

I turn into the park, step onto its stone path and walk between puffs of rosemary toward the windmill. I have walked a mile and my back is tight–all that swinging of a leg–and I put my right hand on my hip and lean back quickly at the waist. I hear the familiar crack deep in my back, my left leg stiffens and kicks forward, my left arm bends and shakes in spastic confusion. I balance flamingo-like a few seconds on my right leg, then sit.

I reach the windmill and look up. And then I, who once ran about it, asks my question: with no wind and no mill, are you still a windmill?

***

I am standing on a rooftop in the old walled city of Jerusalem when at 4:04 on a Friday afternoon a siren sounds as it does here every week. It stops and the Sabbath, silent, begins. And I remember another silence that followed another great sound not far away. For the crash blew out my eardrum and for a time, I heard nothing.

And then the world was full of noise — beeps and alarms and intercoms and voices — and I was silent. And the absence of my voice was audible. So I listened and heard what I had not before — the wee squeak of a first sneeze, the echo of smacked lips, the soft click of my thumb pressing a blue square button embossed with the white silhouette of a nurse.

In the quiet of my first night at Sinai, I heard a scream. It was a sustained, bloodcurdling scream, a woman in a horror film. My body jerked. The scream stopped, then returned, words articulated but incomprehensible. Then more screams descending into a frantic cough.

Then I saw her — a girl, maybe 16, skinny and tall, with half her head shaved and long dark scraggly hair falling from the other. She looked like a demon and ran screaming from my door.

My heart pounded. I began to sweat. My call bell was clipped to the railing on the right of my bed and I put my thumb on it and pressed. No one came. The screaming continued. Sweat wet my face and I pressed the button repeatedly. Where was help?! I felt dizzy. It occurred to me that perhaps there had been a mistake: I had been sent to a mental institution! Minutes passed. I was dizzy, drenched and bewildered when the nurse entered my room and told me that the girl had been in a car accident and could not speak.

I calmed. I listened. I thought of the girl. Wrote William Carlos Williams: “The poem springs from the half-spoken words of such patients….”

Time passed and I readied for bed one night when a man I could not see began to moan. Minutes passed and still he moaned and then an hour passed and I was exhausted and began to count the moans and time the moans, their metronomic parabolic rise and fall. The nurses did not make the moans stop and the moans continued for nights until the man was gone and I did not care to where.

There was more noise too. Margaret was loud. Tufts of black and white hair did not conceal a scar on her scalp and she blurted out unpleasant words and glowered at all. And one Saturday night as my father recited a prayer to mark the end of the Sabbath and I held a forbidden candle, middle-aged Margaret pushed open my door with her foot and wheeled in.

My father stopped. We closed the door. Margaret looked at the flame and we looked at Margaret. Her expression contorted. “You can’t have fire,” she said.

“Hi Margaret,” I said.

“Hi sunshine.”

I explained that this was a special candle and the fire was a secret. Margaret listened as my father resumed the prayer. She left and never told.

Years passed and I thought of Margaret and the moaning man and the screaming girl and their half-spoken words and my own words that were whole. And I appreciated the words I spoke more for having once not been able to speak them. Wrote Melville: “Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”

Contrast. It is the short sentence that stands out in contradistinction to the long, the sound to the silence. You are mindful of what you do not have and so are truly mindful of what you do have. And if the gods are kind, you truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive when you live in a hospital or break your neck or are sick or lose someone you love or suffer in any existential way. You know death and so may wake each morning pulsing with ruddy life. Some part of you is cold and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm. And even to be cold. When one winter morning years after the crash, I stepped onto a tile floor and the underside of my left foot felt a flash of cold stone, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow.

The excerpt above comes from the new Byliner Original by Joshua Prager, Half-Life: Reflections from Jerusalem on a Broken Neck. It’s available for $3.99 at Amazon’s Kindle Store and Apple’s iBookstore. It is also a Nook Snap at BarnesAndNoble.com, and a Short Read at Kobo.

So how did Prager come to TED? He spoke at the New York stop of our worldwide talent search. There he gave a shorter talk, about reaching his “half-life” – the exact moment when he had lived as long after the crash as he had before. Below, hear what he spent this moment, which calls “a looming uber-anniversary.”

And here, read the TED Blog’s Q&A with Prager after his talent search talk »

“An extended illness had changed the way I could access the world … I’d seen my life slip away and become restricted,” explains Austin in today’s talk, which was given at TEDxWomen in December. “When I started using the wheelchair 16 years ago, it was a tremendous new freedom … I could whiz around and feel the wind in my face again. Just being out on the street was exhilarating.”

And yet, Austin noticed that people started treating her very differently.

“It was as if they couldn’t see me anymore, as if an invisibility cloak had descended,” says Austin. “They seemed to see me in terms of their assumptions of what it must be like to be in a wheelchair. When I asked people their associations with the wheelchair, they used words like ‘limitation,’ ‘fear,’ ‘pity’ and ‘restriction.’ … I knew that I needed to make my own stories about this experience.”

In today’s jaw-dropping talk, Austin explores how the divide between the way she sees herself and the way others see her inspires her art, which challenges the traditional notion of disability and shares the joy she feels experiencing the world from her chair.

One of Austin’s first series in this vein was called “Traces from a Wheelchair,” created in 2009. For the work, Austin used paint on the wheels of her chair to create glorious loops — both on enormous sheets of paper and on the grass outside the gallery showing the exhibit.

“The wheelchair became an object to paint and play with,” explains Austin. “It was exciting to see the interested and surprised responses from people. It seemed to open up new perspectives.”

Austin went on to found Freewheeling, an initiative to expand the bounds of Disability Arts with fellow creators Jack Morris and Shirley Phillips. The group soon staged the three-part installation “Freewheeling: An Absent Presence or a Present Absence,” also in 2009, bringing the same concept to the streets of the town of Plymouth.

While many loved the installation, though, some locals saw the exhibit as graffiti — leading the BBC to cover the exhibit. “Some people may see it as vandalism,” Austin says defending her work. “But it’s the thought and concept that makes it artwork.”

Next, Austin had a crazy idea: to use her wheelchair to explore underwater. In 2010, with a grant from the Arts Council England’s Impact program, she began building an underwater wheelchair for a work she called “Testing the Water.”

“I realized that scuba gear extends your range of activity in just the same way that a wheelchair does,” explains Austin in today’s talk. “But the associations attached to scuba gear are ones of excitement and adventure — completely different to people’s responses to the wheelchair. So I thought, ‘I wonder what will happen if I put the two together?’”

“When we started talking to people about it, engineers were saying it wouldn’t work, the wheelchair would go into a spin, it was not designed to go through water — but I was sure it would,” Austin told the BBC of the chair. “If you just put a thruster under the chair all the thrust is below the center of gravity so you rotate. It was certainly much more acrobatic than I anticipated.”

Austin had hugely ambitious plans for her underwater wheelchair. She applied to be part of the Cultural Olympiad, the art extravaganza surrounding the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games. The plan: to take the underwater wheelchair to the ocean.

The incredible work above, which Austin called “Creating the Spectacle,” not only required months of intense physical training — it also necessitated a creative and technical team. Trish Wheatley, co-producer, shares in a blog post that the crew headed to Egypt to film Austin exploring the Red Sea in her wheelchair. The location gave the tropical backdrop and marine life that make this video so magical. And, because the water was warmer, Austin could dress in everyday clothing. The video took six days of filming, Austin going under for multiple 20-minute dives.

“Creating the Spectacle” was performed on August 29. For it, a swimming pool was transformed into an unconventional stage, with 23 scuba-equipped spectators (several of them disabled) going underwater to watch Austin dive in live. The performance was synthesized with the footage of Austin in the Red Sea and with the video above, called “Finding the Flame,” which shows Austin discovering the Paralympic torch in a cave

We can’t wait to see where Austin’s wheelchair will take her next. We place bets on: the sky.

Close your eyes and listen to the grunts and jostling, the smack of rubber on cement and triumphant high-fives. You could be listening to a pickup basketball game anywhere. But you’re in Afghanistan and this is much more than just a game.

It is the country’s very first wheelchair basketball tournament and the players are all disabled. Some have lost limbs to landmines, while others have suffered spinal cord injuries in car accidents. But you wouldn’t know it by looking in their eyes.

In a country where disabled people are generally given pity but no rights, this sight is nothing short of incredible. Look beyond the sweat and smiles, and you’ll discover a newfound sense of purpose.

Their coach and referee, US basketball player and trainer Jess Markt, describes the feeling as euphoric. “Two years ago these guys were barely leaving their houses,” he says. “Now they say they feel like they can fly.”

This wheelchair basketball tournament was organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in cooperation with the Afghan Para-Olympic Committee, earlier this year. The head of the ICRC’s orthopedic rehabilitation program, Alberto Cairo, says that up until recently, such an event would have been unimaginable.

“I used to think physical rehabilitation wasn’t a priority, but I’ve learned that dignity cannot wait for better times,” says Cairo, who gave a TED Talk last year at TEDxRC².

Suddenly, one of the players scores a goal and Alberto cheers and gesticulates from the sidelines. “I’ve been in Afghanistan for 22 years but I’m still an Italian,” he jokes. “Seriously, though, you can see the players’ psychological and physical transformation… they’ve become so much stronger in many ways.”

This tournament is part of the “big wish” Cairo shared in his TEDxRC² talk for helping disabled people overcome the social and physical barriers they face in war-torn countries. “You can give someone a pair of artificial legs, but what really makes them stand tall is a sense of dignity and pride,” he says in the talk. “It’s a job and knowing they have a place in society. It’s being a student or an athlete. It’s having a say.”

Over the past two decades, Cairo has hired more than 250 former patients to work at the ICRC’s seven rehabilitation centers in Afghanistan. Together, they’ve helped 100,000 people learn to find the strength to not only walk, but also to hope again, through education, training and microfinance programs… and now, sports. The wheelchair basketball initiative has helped train more than 125 Afghan players, including 25 women.

Today, as we mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, we celebrate their success, and the amazing potential of disabled people in Afghanistan and the rest of the world.

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This post was written by Anna K. Nelson, the curator of TEDxRC² and spokesperson for the ICRC.