I remember when my vision began to leave me. I was in the fifth grade. It was a slow process. Slow enough that I didn’t recognize it when it started. When the world began to slip away from me into the fuzzy, ambiguous unknown. I was never a good student. My mind always wandered. I never had that T.V. Sitcom moment where my grades began to drop because I could no longer see the chalkboard, only for some altruistic teacher to bring this problem to the attention of my parents. I wasn’t looking at the chalkboard to begin with. They identified my vision problems during a state-mandated school check up. I sat a good distance from the school nurse, harried from a long day of checking the vision and hearing capabilities of hundreds of squirming fifth graders. She flashed toward me a card with a pyramid of letters which descended into smaller type font the lower you went. I read the letters on each line as she instructed and when she frowned I knew I had messed up. What they don’t tell you about these tests is that the font chosen for the boards are purposefully confusing for those with poor vision. The F’s look like E’s and C’s like D’s. It always seemed like a low-blow to me.

The results were sent to my parents. My dad, being a doctor, had his own eye chart laying around the house and repeated the test on me to double check the nurse’s findings. Again I went through the descending list of letters and again I saw an adult frown after I read them. Though when it was my own father frowning at me, it felt more real, more visceral. I felt like I had failed the most important test of my life and that if I could only have another chance I could do it better. I wanted to do better. The feeling is one that is hard for a kid to comprehend. It was the first moment of my body failing me. Never before had I reached a moment where I couldn’t do what I wanted to, or at least do what was reasonably possible for a short and chubby fifth grader to do. Any obstacle I had previously faced could always be explained away with “I can do this when I’m older.” or “If I practice enough I’ll be able to do it.”. But when your vision fails there is nothing within your power that can fix it. I can remember spending nights starring out of my window towards the trees in my front yard, trying my best to will my eyes into focusing on them. These trees had always been obscured to me from my bedroom window, I always assumed they were obscured for everybody. After it was made clear to me that my vision was deficient, that deficiency ironically came into full focus in my mind and so I obsessed on it.

Life does move on though, and while my vision has progressively gotten worse (to the point where I was once told by an optometrist that not only is it illegal for me to drive without my classes, but that it would be morally reprehensible) I have come to cherish the obscurity that surrounds me without the help of glasses. In moments where I am overwhelmed by the world and its extremely wonderful yet dreadful detail, I have found that having the ability to simply take the lenses away from my eyes allowed my to center myself. With the detail of the world collapsed around me the need to notice and identify disappears. All that I am left with are my own hands which remain in perfect focus. I remind myself that the body is the center of my perception and that everything surrounding me is ancillary to the reality that my mind constructs from what my senses tell it.

If you have glasses, take a moment in your day to sit alone with your glasses off. Look at the room surrounding you. The detail lost to your eyes is not a deficiency but rather a reconstruction of reality with the whole taking precedence over the part. The obscurity that surrounds you is part of a new beauty, a new mode of viewing the world. A mode that Claude Monet spent a lifetime attempting to harness. He was called a genius for it, and yet you can do the same just by taking glass away from your eyes. Isn’t it wonderful?

-Tim Caston