Vision

We're all fascinated by things that directly affect us, or at least we should be. That would explain why I find different ways of seeing so interesting.

By different ways of seeing I mean both physically seeing and mentally comprehending.

For me, seeing is an issue. I'm nearsighted, astigmatic, and very dependent on my glasses. That means, however, that I can see a totally different world just by taking the bloody things off.

Those of you who can't do that wouldn't have any idea how much that shapes a person's life.

Imagine for a moment that glasses had never been invented. After all, humanity did get by without them for thousands of years. If they didn't exist at all, people like me would have no clue that the world was other than blurry. It would be easy for me to assume that everyone around me was only seeing clearly for a metre or two around them, and that distances were nothing but blocks of fuzzy colour to everybody.

If somebody told me otherwise, I probably wouldn't believe him. After all, I'd have evidence to the contrary just by having a look for myself. And if you can't believe your own eyes, why should you trust someone else's?

Physical point of view can't help but affect (or, perhaps create) mental point of view.

If I'd never been fitted for glasses my world would be small. As it is I'm already somewhat preoccupied with pattern and detail, but if I'd never been shown by an optometrist that it was possible to see differently with glasses than I could unassisted, I would have been completely obsessed by those details. I would have lived with the things that I could get close enough to to make sense of, and I would have convinced myself that anything else probably wasn't important. At the very least, big things would have been cause for headaches.

Hmmm.

To a certain extent they are anyway.

So here's the question: is it possible to escape the vision you're born with? I'm speaking on two levels there, in case anyone was wondering.

I can wear glasses or contacts or get laser surgery to improve my sight, but does that so-called correction actually change a brain that's grown up thinking of itself as nearsighted and astigmatic? The moment I take my glasses off, as I said before, I see a different world. Many would say I see less, but how do you know that it's not just other? I see less fine detail with my glasses, but I don't see the big picture without them.

Which one's the true view?






Damned if I know, really.