I got my first pair of glasses when I was in ninth grade after I noticed that I had to squint to make out the numbers Miss Kemp had written on the chalkboard. I can still feel the coolness of the windowless classroom and the momentary panic that ensued when I considered the possible consequences of getting even a single digit wrong in the equation we had been given to solve.
The joy and, more acutely, the relief I experienced a few weeks later after a visit to the ophthalmologist in Savannah and the delivery of my first pair of glasses completely eclipsed any self-consciousness I may have experienced. Pulling the glasses out of their case at the beginning of each class and replacing them as the bell rang to move to the next period was something like Christmas morning, so happy was I to be able to see. The fact that the distant world could now be as clear and accessible as the up-close one was, as far as I was concerned, a miracle.
I thought about that a few days ago after yet another person expressed incredulity at my ability to read and knit and file my nails without the assistance of glasses. I am, I offered, VERY nearsighted and went on to explain that a couple of decades ago, about the time that most of my contemporaries started needing readers for their
aging eyes, my optometrist said to me, “You know, you are probably never going to need reading glasses. You are so nearsighted that you should be able to easily read unassisted your entire life.”
Considering how much reading I did and still do, I accepted that prediction as a gift and have held on to it as though it were a promise.
The promise has held and even now, as I approach the end of my seventh decade, I read and use the computer and stare at my phone with no ocular assistance.
I admit, though, that reading road signs and recognizing friends at a distance and, if it were necessary, deciphering an algebra equation at the front of a classroom are entirely different matters. I need assistance to be able to drive the speed limit and know which exit to take, to follow the score on the television screen, and to identify the person in the pulpit on Sunday. All of which makes me grateful for the tiny piece of plastic I insert into my eye each morning.
At any rate, all that contemplation of visual acuity or lack thereof led me to consider whether nearsightedness and farsightedness might be about more than literal seeing. Could it be that emotional eyesight is equally important?
Might it also be about how one witnesses the world, how one encounters creation, how one interprets what one experiences? Is it possible that some of us can focus on, be content with what is up close while others of us gain clarity only when sharpening our gaze on that which is far away?
The answer is yes.
The farsighted among us are, I think, the scientists and the astronauts, the financiers and the politicians.
They are the people who can see the numbers without squinting. Their consideration is for what lies in the distance, the not-yet, the still to come. They are not discouraged by the smallness of what
they see from here, knowing that it will fill the future. They plan ahead for the rest of us. They are the preparers, the anticipators, the foreseers.
The nearsighted are the writers and artists and creators of all kinds. They are the noticers of the small and inconsequential, the observers of the ordinary and quotidian, the payers of attention to the close-up and nearly invisible. They bend close to gape and gawk. They stop to stare.
They deliberately absorb the atmosphere through which they walk and then sweat it out in the form of paintings and poems, stories and songs.
We don’t get to choose whether our emotional eyes are made to see up close or far away, but, in a world that is continually going into and out of focus, it would do us well to figure it out.
