Don't It Always Seem To Go. . .

You don't know what you got till it's gone.

Gazillions of people just go along breathing and drinking and sleeping and pooping as if there is never going to be an end to them, as if it's no big deal. And then one day, poof!  You can't sleep or there's some little problem like a flood and your community doesn't have clean water. Or your bowels just go on strike. Or, like my friend, you can't breathe without help.  Then it becomes a very big deal. The biggest deal.

There are people all around sleeping and getting clean water from a tap.  People who don't even slow down for a sale on Colon Blow and who breathe without thinking a thing about it. Ungrateful fools!

If you had at least 7 hours of sleep last night, 8 glasses of clean water, a good poop and can fill your lungs with air, you should get on your knees (if they still bend) and thank the Universe. 
Eat your spinach, my friends, because there are children in China without food. And that's all I have to say about that.

The Eyes Have It

Recently I suddenly couldn't focus my eyes well enough to read. I did all the things one does at a time like that. I slapped the monitor, blinked, rubbed my eyes, cleaned my glasses, used some eye drops, asked the person in the next office if my monitor looked blurry to her, took a break, panicked.

I didn't suddenly go blind, you understand. I could still see almost everything, I just couldn't see little tiny squiggles on the screen or paper. I could still see colors and light and people, and cars on the highway. I just couldn't read.

Little squiggles on paper or a monitor. How important can that be, really? Little tiny line drawings on a contrasting background. My fingers push on plastic keys and little tiny line drawings appear on the monitor and flash across the world onto other monitors. And when you read them you can pretty much understand what I was thinking about when my fingers pushed the keys.

I don't think about what my fingers are doing when I type. It's like walking up stairs. If I think about it, I stumble. And I don't think about looking at each tiny squiggle individually and then translating arrangements of them into words which I then translate into ideas. But that's exactly what we do when we read. It's just that we do it so quickly, so automatically that we don't even realize we're doing it. I took it all for granted.

Until I couldn't do it.

Now that the squiggles are coming back into focus (right now print looks rather like a 3D movie without the glasses) it amazes me that anyone can read at all. Our brains and eyes do unfathomable acrobatics at unbelievable speed and we only even think about what's going on when it doesn't work perfectly.

Just pick any one of these arrangements of squiggly lines and think about it. We define them with other arrangements of squiggly lines. We can't even think about words without words. And if we had to sustain all our ideas with spoken words without using written words, we'd all lose our voices from overuse. People have been doing mighty things with words, but they have had to first be able to identify tiny little squiggles on the screen.

The process is breathtakingly beautiful.

So whatever this vision problem is, I think I'll be grateful to it for opening my eyes.