The Eye's Have It

I am composing this without my specs.  Not a big deal to most of you, but an amazing experience for one who has been wearing glasses since the sixth grade. It was at the tender age of eleven that I received my first pair of glasses and “really saw” the golf course across the street from our home, never suspecting what I had been missing beyond twelve feet.

As time passed my myopia became progressively worse. As time passed my arms grew ever shorter as presbyopia added to the mix. Oh the joys of old age! Bifocals became de rigueur. My visual world appeared increasingly smaller and farther away, rather like the side view mirrors on the car which warn that objects are closer than they appear. Unconsciously one’s depth perception adjusts to the distortions.

That is, until this month when my lenses were returned to their pre-pubescent clarity.  More and more I had been seeing through a glass darkly as cataracts progressed, but no more! Cataract replacement surgery has not only refocused increasingly scattered light, but also restored much of my distant vision. WOW! I feel like a ten-year old.

Everything is larger and nearer than I realized. Light is bright, colors clearer. It is a life-altering change, one that I am only just learning to appreciate.  It is an eye-opening experience as I am introduced to a re-sized and refocused world. Do I actually look like that? Is that what high definition TV looks like? Where are those phantom glasses I keep trying to push up on the bridge of my nose? Are you really so close?

The experience is profound enough to cause me to reflect a bit deeper into my perceptions. Have I internalized my myopia all these years, diminishing my relationships with others, holding the world at arm’s length, closing mental ranks while avoiding a world perceived as distant and stunted?  As objects receded have I emotionally withdrawn with them? Had myopia dwarfed my soul too?  I have no answers, but questions are becoming more clearly focused as my sight improves. Adjustments are required. I will need to re-evaluate more than my vision, to adjust my inner world to “objects—and people—that may be closer than they appear.”  The eyes may have it indeed!