One of my holiday gifts this year is new glasses with new frames. Now, I have… complicated vision. My current count is three surgeries (two corrective from many years ago and one retinal reattachment) and at this point I have progressive tri-focal lenses with astigmatism and prism correction. There kind of isn’t an option that I don’t have on my lenses (low index, transitions, low glare, etc.). The point is that new glasses, for me, are kind of a big deal. It also means that eye health is important. I don’t go to an optical shop, I go to a skilled optometrist and get yearly retinal scans (in addition to follow ups with my surgeon).
This year, for the first time, I have TWO pairs of glasses, one for work/general wear and one for driving/outdoors. This isn’t a fashion decision… the focal lengths are in different positions and it makes driving much easier. The result is that, naturally, I see very clearly right now.
When the Dr. suggested that I might benefit from a pair of glasses for driving (thank goodness they were having a sale) it seemed like the height of luxury. But being able to see clearly in different situations is really more of a necessity.
And metaphorically, that’s true of a lot of things in life. There are different ways to see clearly in different situations.
Work is a great example of this. If you have a bill-paying day job, you likely need to see clearly in day job mode when you’re there. You know the drill: show up, be friendly, care about the job, make your boss like you, care about the WORK, be able to answer “where do you see yourself in 5 years” with a work-appropriate response. But from outside, you might also be clearly seeing that corporate work is mostly pointless, the whole corporatocracy is a scam, we’re living through the decline and fall of the West, and we’re just as likely to be MadMax style nomads in 5 years as we are “considering a move into middle management.” How do you reconcile the two perspectives?
Some people don’t of course. They either suffer from massive cognitive dissonance / self-loathing or alternately, they end up not being able to pay their bills in the world we currently live in because of the world that’s coming. But for every person who can ‘freegan’ their way outside the system, there are many more who can’t or won’t. Some of us got mouths to feed and eye surgery to pay for.
The trick is that you need different metaphorical pairs of glasses. You have your work glasses, which clearly show you the truth of being in your job. You have your community glasses, that help you see the reciprocal connections of where you live. You have your society glasses — not remotely rose-colored — that allow you to see past the wall of bullshit and into the harsh but necessary future. Finally, you have your magic glasses, which are a blessing that allow you to see the enchanted, haunted, more-than-human miracle that is the world and also a “They Live”-style curse that shows you the machinations of darker forces who want to force our eyes away from the light.
If you can gracefully swap pairs of glasses as needed, seeing the truth of whatever situation you are in, you will have unlocked a powerful tool for moving through your own life and the world at large. I was just discussing this with a friend of mine… she and I have similar self-sustainability goals (though she is way ahead of me in her achievement of them). But we also have the desire to make our lives prosperous and beautiful and enjoy ourselves. And both those things are clear truths that we can see.
I think that as we move into the back half of this decade, the ability to see clearly in multiple situations is going to be really important for staying coherent and finding our way through a time of chaos and rapid change.
