I can't find my glasses

How much do we really see anyway?.

One of the greatest happenings as an ageing broad was the moment I woke up and I could no longer see clearly. In my case, the rain was not the issue as it was when Jimmy Cliff realised that he was suddenly able to see all the obstacles in his way. Instead, my eyes have done alright in the rain but have instead succumbed to the weariness of age. Suddenly, I was banging into those obstacles both metaphoric and literal.

But who was I kidding? I was told it would happen. I was told that I would wake up at 50 and I would no longer be able to see, probably I wouldn’t be able to get out of a chair any longer without grunting and I would long for more time in bed - the years long smugness I felt as I quietly believed that I would be different somehow, has been extinguished. I too have weary eyes, a tired sack of bones and a deep desire to watch Antiques Roadshow from bed from 5.30pm each night. There is no doubt that age is having its way with me.

What was glorious about this moment of fuzzy eyeballs was the prospect of these weary eyes finally needing glasses. Ever since I was a child, I had hoped that I might be more like my mum who had to wear glasses her whole life. Glasses were my holy grail. Wearing glasses would have provided the evidence needed that I could well be a ‘brainiac’. I wanted to be like many of my childhood heroes who wore glasses – Velma from Scooby Doo, Napoleon Dynamite, Erkle, Garth from Waynes world’s, Plain Jane Super Brain and Mrs Doubtfire - to name just a few. What a cavalcade of inspiring role models! Glasses had an allure that was impossible to ignore.

It was the same desire that I had to get braces. The romance of getting myself a face full of metal consumed my waking moments. I considered deliberately walking into a door so that my parents would have no choice but to mortgage their house to get me some. Can you imagine the romance of needing braces and glasses? This was the stuff of dreams. But neither befell me when I wanted them most. Now, decades after deliberately extinguishing hope for either of these aids to find their way to my face, I can now open my heart again as my face has finally succumbed.

What I hadn’t realised in my fuzzy world view before I was tested and achieved glasses status, was how strange the world was beginning to look. In the distance, the world was a fuzzy blob. No definable leaves on trees. No detail in faces. No knowledge of what signs ahead were telling me. But as the fuzz increased, I adjusted and began to think the world was as I now saw it. And then when I finally got myself my first pair of glasses, I sawl the world again in its high definition. I was blown away. The world looked beautiful behind a couple of magnifying glasses. And it got me thinking about the metaphor and literal reality of glasses. These flawed bodies of ours decode the world around us. What else is fuzzy that I haven’t realised and have become accustomed to, believing the reality of my perception. The sounds that I hear, are they even more incredible if I had the hearing of the bionic man? What other parts of me have dulled over the decades and no longer register the world as it really is? How can we trust ourselves to believe we know anything, when our perceptive toolkit is vulnerable and perhaps entirely lacking.

Jimmy Cliff understood this. He blamed the rain, as did Milli Vanilli (there is likely another investigation to be had here) – but if it’s the rain or the weariness of age – the bottom line is that we are vessels that are unable to claim an accurate perception of the world at all. So, what do we do with that realisation? Perhaps the best part of ageing is realising that while we are flawed perceptive entities, maybe we can largely make it up the way we want it to be. We can choose to find the beauty of the world regardless of whether it is there or not. We perceive whatever the hell we want.

I am yet to be tired of the game I play pulling my glasses on and off my eyes, ‘I can’t see. I can see. I can’t see. I can see.’ I am yet to tire of asking strangers if they would code me as smart just because I’m wearing glasses (which has been a resounding, yes). I am yet to tire of pulling my glasses off my eyes and putting the arms in my mouth in an act that looks like I’m thinking deeply. And I’m excited about looking like a librarian from the 70s with a chain around my glasses so they can hang from my neck.

But mostly, they have reminded me that we need to look with all of us. Perceive with all of us. Understand the world – with all of us. The smugness of believing that we every truly see, is something that maybe drops away as you age, and if you’re still arrogant in believing that you know, a little fuzzy eye will set you back on track. I can see. I can’t see. I can see. I can’t see. I can see.