Sans Fig Leaf
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"Blurred"
1 November, 2007
For some years now I've had a habit of taking off my glasses at home and at the office. This sometimes leads to rather comical scenes of me trying to remember where I left my glasses, which would be a lot easier to find if I had my glasses on.
Not that my eyesight is that bad. A typical room is small enough that most everything in the room is at least recognizable. Yes, a few things at the far end of some rooms are ever-so-slightly blurred, but not too bad.
There was a time when I didn't like even that amount of fuzziness in my vision. When one optomitrist showed me that I could have 20-15 vision (that's better than 20-20) by switching from glasses to soft contacts, I was amazed, and loved the ability to read signs and make out details that my supposedly "perfect sighted" friends couldn't make out. Because eyesight's a complicated thing. It's not just a matter of focus, it's also about resolution. Some people have more receptors crammed into the same amount of area in the eyeball, and they can see details others can't.
So for a number of years I wore contacts faithfully. My reluctance to wear my glasses instead had nothing to do with vanity -- I didn't like not being able to see those teeny details at long distances. I would wear my glasses, late in the evening after I needed to take the contacts out to give my eyes a rest. And usually for a couple of days out of each week, to give my eyes a longer rest, but otherwise, I wanted to see everything in the ultra-sharp 20-15 clarity!
It came as a bit of a shock to me one day, when I went to put on my contacts, when I realized I had left them in the cups so long, they had dried out. I wasn't consciously aware that I had let weeks go by without wearing the contacts.
I thought it about it off and on over the following months. Had it been a gradual thing? Had I gone from a couple days a week without wearing the contacts to three, and then some time later from three to four?
I honestly couldn't say. What I could point to was a shift in my morning habits. For years one of the first things I thought of after waking up was 'where are my contacts?' Then I would get them, go stand in front of the mirror, and most mornings put them in right away. Back then, it was sometime in the middle of that process that I would first wonder if it might be a good day to go with the glasses, instead.
At some point both my contacts and my glasses stopped being one of the first things I looked for when I woke up. The very slight fuzziness around the edges of things at the far end of a room didn't bug me, anymore. So I would get up and go about my business, getting ready for work or whatever, and not think about my eyesight at all until I was on my way out the door--at which point there was seldom enough time to go through the routine of putting in the contacts. So I would grab my glasses and go.
Another thing I realized
was that the change happened around the time that Ray was diagnosed
with an incurable disease. You could say that getting him to his chemo
treatments seemed more important the perfectly sharp vision.
It's true about a lot of
things. Holding out for perfection prevents a lot of people from even
trying. The problem is, you can't get good at something without first
being bad at it. Perfect is something to strive toward, not wait for.
uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
--Ursula K. LeGuin
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