“My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.”

– Stephen Hawking
There’s an old, endless Passover song that rattles off, one by one, all the good things Jehovah did for the Jewish people – parting the Red Sea, etc – following each item with the refrain Dayenu (“It would have been enough”). It would be easy to compose an updated, secular version about Physicist Stephen Hawking, each of whose extraordinary accomplishments in the 50 years since he was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, would have been more than enough for an ordinary lifetime. Consider his groundbreaking work in quantum physics, his breathtaking A Brief History of Time, which sold 10 million copies to at least 9 million people who didn’t understand a word of it, his 30-year tenure as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University – a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton.

 

Dayenu, Dayenu, Dayenu. Add to these the fact that Hawking has achieved most of this in a state of almost total physical immobility, confined to a wheelchair and able to communicate only by twitching his cheek muscles to select words on a computer screen, and that he still has enough of a sense of humor to be thrilled about appearing in cartoon form on the Simpsons, and you are left either deeply inspired or reeling at your own petty gripes and narrowness of vision.

Stephen Hawking, DJ

Stephen Hawking DJs on the Simpsons. Note the bling.

Let’s choose inspiration. Formulating a single sentence can take Hawking as long as ten minutes, yet he has written nearly two dozen books (including a guide for the disabled and, with his daughter Lucy, a children’s book) and starred in Into the Universe, a documentary which he also wrote. He communicates daily via email with physicists all over the world, and insisted on doing a 2011 New York Times interview in person, in spite of debilitating complications from pneumonia that have left him needing round-the-clock care since 2009. Far from indulging in self-pity, though, Hawking considers himself lucky that his day job is to ponder the secrets of the universe. Painstaking though the work must be, he spends every day doing exactly what he loves to do.The Longest Living Survivor of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease)
 
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, is a degenerative motor neuron disease that leads to paralysis and death, usually within five years of diagnosis. Hawking has lived and worked for 50 years with the disease – a complete mystery to ALS experts, some of whom argue that Hawking’s illness may not be ALS at all. Although he can’t personally take credit for his extraordinary longevity, it is yet another of his groundbreaking achievements.So, from all of us here at Big Think, Happy 70th birthday, Stephen! If you had only been one of the smartest humans ever, Dayenu – but you’re something much bigger than that: a model of how to live.