Insight

I am in a restaurant, dining with friends, prior to us all attending the ballet. My eyes become mesmerized by, then squint and flicker with the table's overly bright hanging light. Suddenly there appears a spider like web of black strands in my left eye. Wearing mascara for the first time in years, I think I have gotten some of it in this eye. I brush and rub it lightly. The web remains. I eat and try to ignore my discomfort. Later sitting in our seats, awaiting the ballet performance to begin, I tell my husband about my eye. He encourages me to relax.

When I get home, I pour water in my eye and try to rinse the blackness out. Nothing works, and my anxiety-prone brain kicks in. I treasure my sight...doesn't everyone? But I mean I truly treasure my vision because I love seeing the tallness and greenness of trees, the expanse and blueness of the ocean, the faces of my family and friends, the shoots of flowers peeping through the earth telling me winter will pass. And I love words: both reading them and writing them. How can I describe where I would be without my sight?

I get through the night. My husband goes onto the Internet (our portable encyclopedia and general wonk machine) and we decide what is happening is a phenomenon called “Floaters.” Supposedly, the eye gets dry behind the lens and small fragments of matter can break loose and wander around in the eye. I don't want to be like my mother who in her later years did nothing but talk about her ailments and so I stuff my complaints and concerns. Will this thing last forever? I try to ignore what can't be ignored and decide I'll make an appointment with my optometrist first thing in the morning. Simultaneously, my mind starts going to: what can I learn from this experience?

My optometrist thinks I have been in a fairy world, because I have never heard of “floaters” before. I tell him this makes me feel old, for it is said floaters can be connected to the “aging” of the eyes. But he assures me that every month people in their thirties and forties come in with these concerns, and this benign artistic eye patch usually works itself out in a matter of weeks.

After my exam, I begin to breathe again, and walk down the street wearing sunglasses to temper my blurry, dilated vision. Even with shades on, the world is clearer and brighter and more colorful. With each step, I mumble a repetitive mantra, reminding myself to give thanks for my daily living and seeing. I am in a fog as I teach my students and focus/listen more to what they say. Especially as we humans age, there is always a tendency to become self-absorbed with the “problems” or “obstacles” given and though I only mention my floaters to one student and her grandmother, I intuitively know there are a thousand lessons of “insight” coming my way.

The grandmother tells me about her macular degeneration and my student, whose mother translates books into braille for the blind, tells me about a young elementary kid who is losing his ability to see colors. We nod and acknowledge how difficult it would be to live in a colorless world.

Over the next few weeks I shy away from my usual voracious reading and writing. Am I being encouraged to turn my vision from the outer to the inner realms? To rest my eyes from their narrow outward viewing?

What I have been noticing with my blocked vision is this: everyone appears to be here with a passion or a reason...to draw, to write, to dance, to sing, to mother, to teach, to repair, to create, to be of service. Of course, many of us have a number of these reasons for being. But sometimes we forget these passions/reasons, or at least we think we forget: we stumble, we fall and we scrape ourselves trying to scramble back up to the mountain top where the panorama encompasses our whole world and we finally know what we are supposed be doing.

I have been stumbling. I tend to stumble a lot, of late. I have been allowing the past to pull me backwards for far too long. Once upon a time I was a mother, and my mothering seemed like enough of a reason for being. But it's finally becoming clear to me that this was only a stepping stone. If I have this tendency to melodramatically (for I am a Leo after all) look into a sad, daughterless future, then I must remind myself how the future is only my imaginings and hasn't happened and needed happen so.

I find that when I focus my eyes in a certain way, the floaters disappear. And then I can see clearly what's in front of me. This present, this near vision is all I have to worry about. Each pearl of clarity brings me closer to the object I am trying to see and allows me to understand what my world is all about. These pearls are all that matter...not the past, not the future. Sometimes it is best not to see too much all at once. Sometimes it's best to close and rest one's eyes, to cuddle under the covers of darkness and to simply be with one self and to understand as Virginia Woolf did, that these given insights, “moments of being” are enough.

© 2012