Blindness

I was born with bad eyesight. Until I was nine, I lived in a myopic fog. When my eyes were examined at the insistence of a nun, who had brutalized me for not being able to read off a blackboard for months before having the epiphany that I might not be able to see the blackboard, I was found to have inherited the myopic and astigmatic eyes of my Dutch-American grandmother. In fact, according to an impressed opthamologist at the time, our eyes were a rare physiological match.

While I had mixed feelings about wearing glasses and the new stigma that brought to my life, I was relieved to find out that I was not "mentally retarded", one of many assumptions made by my family about my mental capacity, based on several unfortunate neurological traits I displayed in my early childhood. This did not stop my mother from frequently bemoaning the fact that she had conceived a myopic, as well as "neurotic", child.

I realize now that I would not be alive today if I had been born a member of any other mammalian species. Despite the blindness of my parents and teachers to my poor vision, human society protected me from predators and pitfalls. Though denigrated for my falling short of certain childhood norms, I was allowed to live and grow.

This was an early personal lesson for me about what it means to be human. While I had been brutalized verbally and physically enough to mistrust most human beings, I realized by my adolescence that I had been spared a worse fate by being born into the human species. This took the sting out of being an oddball. I believe the realization that human society often surpasses the goodness of the individuals in it has been the strong foundation of my socialist leanings.

Fighting blindness is an ongoing exercise for me today. After all, isn't that essentially what mindfulness is? It is so easy to be satisfied with my own vision of the world at the expense of my expansive curiosity. The mindset of "I've seen it all before" so easily blocks my vision of someone or something I haven't seen before. In fact, when I find myself saying, "I've seen it all before", I now find myself laughing at myself and the situation. I know my depressive cynicism has been triggered. I also know there is hard work ahead to overcome it.

This is all practice, my humanist practice, as I call it. So much of not being blind is opening the eyes to what is right there in front of you, then opening your mind to what it may mean beyond your assumptions or fears.