Some days, you rise princess-like from your bed before the alarm goes off and you trot into the room to do yoga and your dog licks you appreciatively and you don’t spill an ounce of oatmeal over your clothes.
But most days, it seems like every day this month for me, you knock over your water when you attempt to silence your blaring alarm. You trip over a pillow on the way to the bathroom. Your coffee spill lands perfectly in a place on your pants that is precisely the most embarrassing as you rush to your first class or meeting.
And to add insult to all of these injuries, about two months ago my middle age started to show with a vengeance:
I CANNOT SEE ANYTHING ANYMORE.
It probably started longer ago than two months. But two months ago I hit that point in which you can no longer be in the state of denial and actually make out words on the computer screen. Ya’ll this google doc I am typing on is enlarged to 125%. Nearly every day I have to increase the brightness on my laptop screen from the default setting to twice as bright. At first I thought it was my laptop going bonkers. But then Lucy, with her absurdly young eyes, walked by my now-to-be-finally-readable computer screen and covered her eyes as if being blinded by direct sunlight: “MOM!” she exclaimed, “Why do you have that SO BRIGHT?”
The thing is, it doesn’t look bright to me. It looks just right. And the font doesn’t look big at all.
Ya’ll, I’ve been floundering lately. The word on the street is that everyone is. Or most of us are. In some way or another. I’m trying to find a sunny-edge to all this. You know, along the lines of “it’s darkest before the dawn,” but I’m pretty sure my vision is just going to get worse and my age is going to continue to show its face in all sorts of new and unwelcome ways.
But the thing is, when I think back to my twenty year old self, my actual physiological sight may have been better, but I didn’t see things nearly as clearly as I do today.
Do we exchange one for the other as we age: physical vision for some deeper, more abstract and philosophical kind of vision? As I age, does wisdom progressively come to live in the place that my old-boundless-energy used to roam? Is it possible that the humbling of our body’s downgrade produces a more accurate reckoning with the battles everyone is facing around us?
Or perhaps I need to just stop waxing philosophical and buy some reading glasses.