I recently started wearing my very first pair of reading glasses.
I’ve never ever worn glasses before, so wearing glasses is completely foreign territory for me. Of course I’m not the only one, this is foreign territory for anyone who goes through life without glasses until they start needing them for reading.
But for me (and for a lot of us), having to wear reading glasses was the first time in my life that I’d had to confront the fact that actually, I wasn’t exempt from the changes that other people around me had gone through in life.
You betcha, I was going to have to suck this shit up.
Just like everyone else had sucked it up before me.
And while I looked for a way around this, there wasn’t one.
So I was going to have to come to terms with wearing glasses or contact lenses or whatever else I was going to use in order to be able to read the small print.
But do you know what the best part is?
I’m now happy to wear my reading glasses and I’ve embraced my new glasses-wearing identity.
As is often the case though, my positive approach to wearing glasses arrived in a way that I certainly didn’t expect.
One night, I was looking at my new kitten who happened to be purring contentedly in my arms, his full stomach rising and falling gently. As I looked at this adorable grateful little creature, my eyes filled with sentimental tears. This is normal for me, I’m far more sentimental these days as a direct consequence of having lived more years of life, and I will cry happy tears regularly in association with anything that I love. My kitten doesn’t mind because he figures that I’m good at feeding him.
Anyway, at the time I had just turned off a movie and I wasn’t wearing glasses. However as I started crying, unexpectedly I noticed that my vision was instantly magnified and I saw my kitten in marvellously crisp bright detail.
My tears had magnified my soul.
And not only that, my tears had magnified my soul all by themselves. No glasses needed.
I looked this phenomenon up and according to Cleveland Clinic’s article on Tears, our eyes continuously release small quantities of what are known as basal tears that sustain and protect our corneas, and help us see clearly by focusing outside light. While the tears that I had been crying were emotional tears (and of a different category altogether), perhaps the temporary abundance of tears in my eyes had given them some additional temporary focus and magnification.
But when I thought about it, even if I wasn’t crying, the pain I’d experienced as a simple consequence of having lived a few years of life really had magnified my soul.
I’d experienced joy and laughter too, and I certainly had the sheer wonderfulness of laughter lines on my face. But as they say, when everything is wonderful, you aren’t learning anything. It was the pain I’d lived through that had deepened my soul.
Not that the pain I’d lived through was major compared to most people, my life had been an easy walk in the park compared to the lives of most people on this planet. But I had lived through some pain. Much of it was self-inflicted, but it was pain nonetheless. I’d made mistakes, I’d grieved, I’d grazed my knees more times than I could count, and I’d got back up again every time.
My soul was larger and stronger as a result. And this makes sense, because our souls cannot help but grow as a result of the experiences we live through. Not only was my soul larger and stronger, it was also softer, more loving and more forgiving at the same time. And after having lived the earlier part of my life out of touch with my soul with disastrous results, I was now far more in touch with it too.
So when you look at me wearing my reading glasses now, you are looking directly at a magnified soul who has survived and thrived through pain.
My reading glasses show you that I’m a bad arsed bitch, and they tell you that you need to respect my greater level of knowledge, my greater level of skills, and my greater ability to love you.
And you will pick this up, because our eyes are how our souls connect with each other.
This is why we miss eye contact so much when it is noticeably absent. A boss of mine told me a story that provided a good example of this. He’d had to book in to see a GP he doesn’t normally see in order to get some antibiotics for a bad cold. When he came back to work he commented that the GP he saw looked exclusively at the computer screen instead of at him, before disinterestedly waving him away with a script. It was as if he didn’t exist at all.
As William Shakespeare said, “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” This is one of the truest sayings I’ve ever heard, because our eyes really do communicate so much of our soul. They twinkle when we tell a mischievous story, they express playfulness and generosity, and they tell stories of strength that has arisen out of immense pain.
Avijeet Das sums this up perfectly in his quote below:
I love Avijeet’s quote because I’m looking for the unsaid words and the good things that other people’s souls might be able to tell me too. While I used to be absolutely terrible at making eye contact, I’m much better at it now because I really want to connect with other people’s souls and I want them to be able to connect with mine.
Reading glasses have also given me another awesome benefit.
They make me look smarter. We all know that wearing glasses is stereotypically associated with wisdom, knowledge and intelligence. This is why people giving a presentation wear eye glasses when they don’t even need them, they’re simply used as a confidence boosting prop that makes them look smarter in front of a crowd. I’m all for both benefits, and *uck it all, I’ve earnt them.
I hope this article might be of some benefit to you when you start wearing your first pair of reading glasses.
© Annemaree Jensen