Seeing Things For the First Time Again (One Moment)

The following is a re-run of a post from a year or so ago.  Professor B. Worm's blog on one life changing moment encouraged me to post it. 

My sister had to hold me, I didn't have glasses yet.

One of my earliest memories is Papa carrying me from the car to the house the day I got my first pair of glasses. He set me down inside the front door and I just stood there looking around, soaking it in. My mother says I couldn't possibly remember it because I was only two years old, but I don't think you forget the first time you see things as they really are.

The brown floors were individual pieces of wood with lighter and darker grains. The pink blobs on the wall of the bathroom were flamingos standing on only one of their spindley legs. Trees had leaves - individual leaves. There were just so many more little things making up larger things.

People would ask my parents how they got me to leave the glasses on, after all I was just a toddler. But I was a toddler who could finally see. And vision is a great motivator. I wish I would have saved every pair of glasses I've ever had. It would be fun to see how lenses and fashions changed. I'm sure if I tried on my first glasses now, I wouldn't be able to see at all, even though they clarified things so well 53 years ago.

We all look through lenses all the time. We look through the lens of our culture, our upbringing, our beliefs. And we change. The lens that made things clear in our childhood may really muddle reality now. And that's ok. We outgrow our beliefs the way I outgrew my glasses.

We never get to the point in life that we no longer need to check our prescriptions. Usually vision changes so insiduously that we don't realize we aren't seeing clearly until we get new lenses. Then it's just amazing.
Seeing things as they really are is an experience we never outgrow.

Seeing Things For the First Time Again

One of my earliest memories is Papa carrying me from the car to the house the day I got my first pair of glasses. He set me down inside the front door and I just stood there looking around, soaking it in. My mother says I couldn't possibly remember it because I was only two years old, but I don't think you forget the first time you see things as they really are.

The brown floors were individual pieces of wood with lighter and darker grains. The pink blobs on the wall of the bathroom were flamingos standing on only one of their spindley legs. Trees had leaves - individual leaves. There were just so many more little things making up larger things.

People would ask my parents how they got me to leave the glasses on, after all I was just a toddler. But I was a toddler who could finally see. And vision is a great motivator. I wish I would have saved every pair of glasses I've ever had. It would be fun to see how lenses and fashions changed. I'm sure if I tried on my first glasses now, I wouldn't be able to see at all, even though they clarified things so well 52 years ago.

We all look through lenses all the time. We look through the lens of our culture, our upbringing, our beliefs. And we change. The lens that made things clear in our childhood may really muddle reality now. And that's ok. We outgrow our beliefs the way I outgrew my glasses.

We never get to the point in life that we no longer need to check our prescriptions. Usually vision changes so insiduously that we don't realize we aren't seeing clearly until we get new lenses. Then it's just amazing.

Seeing things as they really are is an experience we never outgrow.

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.