We all love heroes or heroines of any type; we applaud their cleverness and ingenuity and are blown away if the hero or heroine is young in age. For example, who wouldn’t be impressed with Gitanjali Rao, an 11-year-old girl from Flint, Michigan? Because of Flint’s water crisis, she invented a device that can detect lead in drinking water as part of her science fair project. She’d been keeping tabs on the town’s progress and watching her parents test their own water, and when she wasn’t able to find a better way of what her parents were doing, she invented a three-part device that could be the next big thing in water purification that can help to keep thousands healthy.

Then there is Hannah Herbst, who in seventh grade, found that her Ethiopian pen pal was living in energy poverty with minimal access to electricity (lights, medical supplies, sewage control systems). She says, “I realized the environment was important at a very young age. I have always been curious, and as a child, I preferred ‘rock hunts’ to dollhouses, which sparked my first interest in learning about the environment.”

So she created an ocean energy probe, called BEACON, or Bringing Electricity Access to Countries through Ocean Energy, which converts the kinetic movement of current energy from any moving body of water into a source of useable electricity. It’s made from 90 percent recycled materials easily found throughout the world, including 2-liter plastic soda bottles and recycled spoons. Hannah envisions BEACON being used in developing countries to power desalination pumps for fresh water, run centrifuges with which to test blood, and power electric buoys for maritime navigation. She is currently working on tweaking the final iteration of BEACON, and is in the process of open-sourcing her prototypes so that others around the world can replicate her creation, both for combating energy poverty in developing nations as well as to encourage STEM education in classrooms worldwide.

And there are other examples from those older. Zhang Yongqing created a combination wheelchair and foldable bicycle in Bejing. Or in Florianopolis, Brazil, you’ll find one of the most stunning houses constructed with a massive amount of recycled glass bottles arranged in several innovative ways. The list goes on and is endless.

Understanding that ingenuity is a quality of being inventive, creative, and clever in how we apply ideas to solve problems or to meet challenges in our lives, what struck me most about that thought was the awareness that each of us deserves applause for our own ingenuity for each day we live.

In these turbulent times, who isn’t faced with a crisis (miniscule or overwhelming) each day, whether it be of our own doing, such as our thoughts, words, and actions, or manmade, such as being affected physically or emotionally by others’ actions over which we have no control, or being overruled by equipment whether it is something simple like your phone overwriting your words or a car failing to move? You get the picture, don’t you?

I haven’t met anyone who sails through life without disruption. Today, most of us live in some state of uncertainty and are given numerous opportunities to test our own genius. Yet, when we overcome any challenge, most times, we don’t stop and give ourselves credit for our cleverness in solving our problems. Perhaps the reason we don’t is that we consider our lives like the game “whack-a-mole” and there’s always the next crisis ready to pop up. Who knows?

I hope each of us can appreciate more what we do each day to meet its challenges and give ourselves a pat on the back for our cleverness in how we handle them. When we can do that, we will be better able to enjoy our day and not worry about the future.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of CHOICES Magazine