Having spent ten days without my lenses in my eyes I am off for biometry, which is to say, measuring the eyes without the mitigating effects of contact lenses, to see what they can see.
Well I can save them the trouble. I can say what they can see.
Not much.
I have spent the last ten days in a foreign land I thought I had left at the age of sixteen. The world has become strange.
And dangerous. As my eyes have reverted to what they really are, voyages such as going down stairs with or without my glasses, have become very risky. Where are the stair edges? Does anyone know? Other stuff is shifting too. Door sides are, apparently, negotiable in terms of position but not hardness.
Uncertainty is rife. Previously without my lenses I was a one-woman microscope (not the most fetching title for a comic superhero,nevertheless, accurate.) Now I cannot see to pluck my eyebrows. For all I know people at the end of the drive could be greeting me with hilarious enthusiasm because I am sporting a handlebar moustache, and a monobrow. I have no idea what books I am putting out. Someone did actually donate Fifty Shades of Grey and I am squinting through the zip lock bag, like fury, to avoid it ending up in the children’s section.
I haven’t vacuumed the new carpet because it’s black anyway.
I used to tell the tale of how I had to know the bus timetable by heart to get to school because I couldn’t read the number on the front of the bus. I am back there right now. For all I know the garden could be full of weeds. Passers-by may think I am kissing the pot plants but I am actually just trying to get them into view, I am likely to get closer up visuals of slugs than anyone other than another slug would get.
Amazingly I have been told I would not qualify for free surgery because my eyes are not bad enough, yet I am borderline for driving safely. Just how badly do some people see?
If you can smell, see. hear, feel and taste you are so lucky. Yet bees must buzz to each other ‘thozz humnazz cannot zee in ultra violet, you know.’ ‘How duzz they know where the nectar izz?’
The world does not exist at all. What exists is your interpretation of it, according to your perception of it.
Einstein said that we decide early in our lives whether we live in a hostile universe or a benign universe and behave accordingly. This was certainly true of my difficult mother, permanently aggressive in unnecessary self-defence because of her father. I believe notorious Roman emperor, Caligula, was warped by jealousy and his teenage years of seeing awful excess on Capri. He ended up thoroughly stabbed and no one was sorry.
The most difficult challenge in life is rising above your idiosyncratic perception of the world to arrive at a dispassionate view of reality and behaving according to what is, rather than reacting to what you think is the case, based on your subjective view.
The traditional view of Justice is the blindfolded statue with the scales of justice in one hand and the sword in the other.. I think she might have done better with a nice cup of tea in one hand, a box of tissues in the other and her lenses in.
Well, that’s how I see it.
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