Speed is a highly valued quality among people, to the point where other qualities are often taken for granted. When measuring the work between different people or machines, most will typically measure the time it took to get a task done. The best workers turn their work in ahead of time, and the best machines do their job faster than the competition. It may be tempting to blame this on our modern world and a culture of instant gratification, but I think if we were to be honest with ourselves, we’d find that it’s always been there. Why else would we have fables like “The Tortoise and the Hare” if not to remind us of the foolishness of that instinctual assumption? This need for speed seems to be at least somewhat hardwired into all of us, and that’s why it can hurt when you’re not so fast.

Several months ago, I attended the annual educational conference sponsored by the Chattanooga Autism Center. This was particularly a rare opportunity since I was not making a presentation and took advantage of being able to select those workshops that I felt I needed to attend.

Music was one of the first forms of human communication transmitted through aural practices of passing musical sounds through the generations, and ancient artwork indicates that it may have even pre-dated language. Science-based research has confirmed that music can be a powerful neural transmitter in the brain. Musical notation, given its complexity in the Western tradition, can be a challenge to learn and is generally an inaccessible language for persons with intellectual or developmental disabilities.

When I walked into my first aquatic physical therapy session last year in January, I was dragging my feet. My chart explained that I had a rare connective-tissue disorder in conjunction with ASD, and that my overall physical strength was very weak. But as Ellen, my new physical therapist at St. Lukes Therapy asked questions, I could already see in her eyes that her gears were spinning. She was clearly on a mission to figure out how to improve my situation. Urgently.

Forty-five years ago, in the summer of 1978, my father died. There was no warning, no accident, no long, drawn-out illness. He simply tucked me under the covers at bedtime and by the morning he was gone. And the narrative I was given as a distraught and grieving ten-year-old, was that he’d died of a heart attack in his sleep. Something I never had reason to question and neither did anyone else. The problem was that it was a lie and I wasn’t going to learn the truth that my father had actually died by suicide for another 35 years.

HELEN, The Journal of Human Exceptionality, presents – in a two-part series – proceedings of the Inaugural Health Equity Summit: Developing a Model of Healthcare for People with Intellectual and/or Developmental Disabilities in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. As readers will see, a group of clinicians, health policy experts, people with IDD, family members, home and community-based service providers, researchers and advocates from the region and from across the country convened a novel approach to community planning around a single focus, health equity for people with IDD.