By When I was younger, my siblings would always tease my about my glasses and my near-blindness.
“What’s life with four eyes like? How does it feel knowing that your eyes are just bad at being eyes?”
Now that I’ve traded in my purple butterfly fifth grade glasses for some nice tortoise shell Warby Parkers, they’ve surrendered to my cool hipster vibes. But for a while, those words stung. It did indeed bother me knowing that I had inferior retinas to my brother and sister, because everything was a competition, and I was losing all because my dang pupils couldn’t focus on the black board at school.
One day I came home and was watching reruns of “Grey’s Anatomy” on the couch. My glasses were hurting the back of my ears, so I took them off. Then the screen went fuzzy, so I panned my vision to the window, overlooking the woods beyond my house.
And suddenly yet quietly, in the midst of my 20/60 vision, I had found the first profound moment of clarity in my life.
The leaves on the 80-foot tall oak trees were perfect leaf blobs that swayed with the calm wind. The sunlight from a spring afternoon would shine through the spaces in between each foliage; it was like mother nature’s red carpet spotlight, starring the world’s most beautiful flora and fauna. I was left astonished.
The landscape was perfect, and it was all mine.
I realized how lucky I was, because my sibling’s perfect corneas could never process the forest like this. Seeing that scenery from a blurred photograph just wouldn’t be the same.
I started looking at the trees like that without my glasses for hours, just to put my life on pause for a moment.
There are many “morals of the story” that we can extrapolate from this epiphany: like love yourself or appreciate the little things in life, etc. Perhaps the most important one of this time is sometimes you have to zoom out so far that you can see the whole image, even if it is a little blurry.
We can relate this to the nature of our times right now as well.
Take the whole debacle over the electoral college right now.
Perhaps the most important one of this time is sometimes you have to zoom out so far that you can see the whole image, even if it is a little blurry.
It’s stupid and unnecessary, one group preaches, while contestants declare that it plays an integral role in the presidential selection. Maybe if we take the time to see both sides, and see while the electoral college does amplify the missing voices of our country (that’s right we see you back country Wyoming), in a sense it does suppress city folk’s sentiments, which is close to a lot of power and money in this nation. If we think about all the points at hand, then maybe we can come to a proper resolution.
But hey, I’m just a girl with 20/60 vision, what do I know?
So my best advice is find your blurry forest, find your perfect leaf globs that sway with the wind and are illuminated by the radiant sun. And hold on to it forever.
