Seeing Clearly Again!

My sight has always been so precious to me, especially since my uncorrected vision is so very poor.  Until last year, I was so fortunate to be able to see very well with contacts.  But, 2014 became known, among other things, as the year of reading glasses within reach.  Having worn contacts since seventh grade, and then rarely donning glasses since my first contact lens fitting, I was unprepared for life interrupted by the search for magnification.  Julia and Gar laughingly asked if there were reading glasses in every room.  And the answer was a resounding YES! 

At my annual eye exam I expressed my extreme frustration.  When Dr. L assessed my situation, he produced another life-changing solution, multifocal contacts. 

I didn't realize how much I'd actually visually missed during the last year until I once again had full range of vision without readers. 

Regardless of the nature of our correctable issue, we owe it to ourselves to seek options that work, something that I once again see clearly.

You Don't See What I See

We all see things a bit differently due in part to:

• actual exam results based upon 20/20
• attentiveness
• frame of reference
• distractions
• familiarity with setting
• experience
• what we are looking for
• selective perception
• feedback from others
• what else is going on in our lives
• distractions
• preferences
• interest
• timing

So, when it is important to have others see things our way, we might consider different ways of presenting our vision.

Sight Doesn't Ensure Vision

As my blog, "Everything's Connected" indicates, I embrace 100%, the premise that we are all connected. Though the uniformly accepted premise is that there are 6 degrees of separation, my premise is that in Houston, there are only 3 degrees of separation.

I had the most fortunate privilege of discovering a very "insightful" Houston entrepreneur who has converted his lack of sight (he's been blind since birth) to inspire us all to harness the unimagined.  Vince Morvillo is a highly successful business consultant and entrepreneur.  With no outside financial support, Vince personally built one of the largest sales organizations on the Gulf Coast, taking it to profitability in just two years. 

He has achieved the unimaginable, becoming the first blind person in history to win a national yachting championship. 

Vince has replaced lack of sight with incredible vision.  I hope that we can all learn to use all of our senses to achieve our ultimate potential.

Revolutionizing Sight

Contact lenses revolutionized life for people like me.  I got my first pair of glasses in the 4th grade.  The standards when I was a child required you to be 13 to get contact lenses.  There wasn't a "maturity factor" option to get an earlier contact lens prescription.  I impatiently counted the days until I could get contacts.

Though a respected ophthalmologist, who examined me, insisted that "putting contact lenses on your eye to restrict additional vision impairment" was like "putting a hat on your head to keep you from growing",  contact lenses were a godsend for me.  My vision was regressing each year before I started wearing contacts.  My vision has shown remarkably little degradation since I became a contact lens wearer.

Technological advancements have vastly improved contact lenses.  For many years, I wore hard contacts.  There was a lengthy period of increasing your wearing time, over a period of days or weeks, to allow your eye to adjust to this foreign object.  Of course, today, any contact lens wearer leaves the prescriber's office with a comfortable lens, that needs little to no adaptation time.  Today's technology comparison of my first lenses, to those others and I now wear, would probably be equivalent to using a typewriter versus enjoying the benefits afforded by laptops and smart phones.

How thankful I am that brilliant, entrepreneurial researchers continue to enhance the ways that we all see the world!

Different Ways of Seeing

I still vividly remember my precious Mother's angst as we drove home from the optometrist so very many years ago. With my new glasses, I kept commenting on the individual leaves on the trees, mortar between the bricks and other details that lucky 20/20 vision individuals routinely experience.  Distant views of these things had been obscured with my serious near-sightedness.  I had no basis for comparison, so my newfound clarity was awesome. 

Mine is a dramatic example of illumination, but hopefully a reminder that we all see things differently.  Only by comparing visions do we have the benefit of different ways of seeing a situation.

Fog

So often when I'm driving, I am thrilled to notice the many shades of green that our subtropical climate provides year-round.  And it's delightful to see seasonal blooms throughout the year.  Our normally sunny clime highlights so many lovely attributes.

On my way to church on Sunday, uncharacteristically heavy fog blanketed my trek.  Rice Boulevard's marvelous canopy of trees provided a special tunnel leading me to my destination.

We usually think of fog negatively.  When we're in a fog, we're not thinking as clearly as we'd hope.  Fog can cause countless transportation delays.

However, today's fog made me appreciate anew the fabulous canopy of trees surrounding Rice University.  Thank you, Grandfather Lovett, for your enduring vision.