I always felt sorry for the people in wheelchairs. Some people, old and weak, cannot get around by themselves. Others seem perfectly healthy, dressed in business suits. But whenever I saw someone in a wheelchair, I only saw a disability, not a person.Then I fainted (晕倒) at Euro Disney due to low blood pressure.This was the first time I had ever fainted, and my parents said that I must rest for a while after First Aid. I agreed to take it easy but,as I stepped towards the door, I saw my dad pushing a wheelchair in my direction. Feeling the colour burn my cheeks, I asked him to wheel that thing right back to where he found it.

I could not believe this was happening to me. Wheelchairs were fine for other people but not for me, as my father wheeled me out into the main street, people immediately began to treat me differently.Little kids ran in front of me, forcing my father to stop the wheelchair suddenly. Bitterness set in as I was thrown back and forth. “Stupid kids ... they have perfectly good legs. Why can’t they watch where they are going?” I thought. People stared down at me, with pity in their eyes. Then they would look away, maybe because they thought the sooner they forgot me the better.

“I’m just like you!” I wanted to scream. “The only difference is that you’ve got legs and I have wheels.

People in wheelchairs are not stupid. They see every look and hear each word. Looking out at the faces, I finally understood: I was once just like them. I treated people in wheelchairs exactly the way they did not want to be treated. I realised it is some of us with two healthy legs who are truly disabled.

Alex Elman runs a big business — something difficult to imagine after she lost her sight in her twenties. But Elman says that losing her sight helped her focus on finding success.

Elman’s father planted a hillside vineyard in western Massachusetts in 1981. It’s where Elman fled during the darkest period of her life. When she was 27 years old, she went blind due to complications from juvenile diabetes (糖尿病) 17 years ago. She recalled, “I hid in my home. I hid in the place. For me, that was the safest place in the world.”

Elman is now the founder of Alex Elman Wines, a growing portfolio (系列产品) of organic wines from all around the world: Chianti from Italy, Torrontes from Argentina. Elman doesn’t work alone. Her assistant, a guide dog named Hanley, is something of a wine snob, and quite a beggar. Hanley travels to all of the wineries that Elman does, from South America to Europe.

At first, Elman resisted the idea of a guide-dog. Now it’s hard to imagine her life, or her business, without him. She said. “When someone tells me something is organic and I don’t really believe it because I taste something funny on it, I’ll put it in front of his face and if he likes the wine, he’ll go to sniff it. If it’s not right, he’ll turn his head away. He gets in the dirt with me. He scratches around. He makes sure that we see earthworms and butterflies. That’s how we know that the soil is actually organic, and that there are no chemicals.”

Elman told CBS News she believes the loss of her vision was a gift. She said, “It allowed me to pay attention to what I thought was important and also to be able to teach people that the broken hang nail is not a big deal, you know what I mean? Don’t sweat the small stuff. Don’t sweat the big stuff either.”

I was traveling with my husband and three teenage sons in the United States. We ordered our food at a fast-food place, and with my meal I also wanted a blueberry pie. My husband is the chatty one in the family and likes to socialize, so he started a conversation about the place where blueberries grow with the waitress. She answered, with some anxiety, “They grow on trees.”

The whole family’s jaws dropped! How could this girl not know where blueberries grow? We tried not to embarrass her, and just took the opportunity to teach her a little about how blueberries grow, on small shrubs (灌木) on the ground. She seemed to appreciate learning something new. We can’t know all the same things, as you'll see from the next thing I'm going to tell you.

In 2002 our family made a short trip to a coffee plantation. The road to the plantation was narrow, filled with sharp bends. I worried about hitting another car. We didn’t, lucky us! When we finally got to our destination, we learned a lot about the plantation and coffee production, but we didn’t see any coffee plants. Where were they? We decided to ask one of the people working there. “So where are the coffee plants? We can’t see them anywhere.”

She reached out her arm and caught a twig (细枝) right next to us and explained, “This is the coffee plant and these little things will be coffee beans.” I looked around in embarrassment, as we were surrounded by coffee plants! She explained that coffee plants aren’t big and that they have to grow in the shade of other bigger plants. I appreciated her lesson.

We love our coffee, but I’m sure most of my countrymen would not be able to recognize a coffee plant among other tropical plants if asked. Our jaws can drop at different things, depending on geographical locations, at what we know and don’t know. Never take anything for granted!