It’s raining.
It’s been raining all morning. Gray skies, the roads are soaked, a few raincover clad backpackers are sulking around otherwise abandoned coffee shops.
If you wanted to define gray in three dimensions, this would be it. This right here.
In this entirely gray world, me. I just bought a ten ringit umbrella from a little sales shop woman just back around the corner. I had merely slowed my pace to gaze at the umbrellas in the shop, and she immediately pounced. Enough to get me to stop for a moment. She’s got one of the umbrellas off the rack, temptingly opening and closing it, wide smile, selling it like we’re on a used car lot in middle America.
Come on. Why walk in the rain? Is two dollars, stay dry all day! You want big one? Small one? Big one, better! And same price! Look at this, pretty green color!
So here I am, padding along the rain soaked streets of Penang, Malaysia, with my new green umbrella. Soaked sandals. Raincover clad backpack. I like to imagine that I’m neither sulking nor carrying that monster size bag that all the gap year students and wannabe hippies are saddled with. But who knows, I’m probably just another gray backpacker shadow in the grayness of this little Malaysian border town.
And then I see her. The surreal woman from the other day.
She’s pulling her bicycle out onto the street. A bicycle packed with stickers of country flags. Packed with waterproof panier bags. An unfolded, small portable solar panel on the rear rack. Despite it’s load the bike looks at once light and competent. Road proofed. Ready to go anywhere.
And it is.
I met her for the first time a day ago, at the local market. Buying some sort of local delectable pancake situation and I copied her snack choice. Must be good if the well traveled looking woman picks it, right?
We had struck up a conversation, and I get to find out that she spent the past eight years riding her bike around the world. All of Africa, all of the Americas, Europe, the US, Asia. Eight years and counting.
She has a cheap DSLR camera. Cheap camera and an expensive, big L-series Canon lens attached to it. I take it as a good summary of clear priorities.
I’m also getting an unsettling impression that I’m looking at a life being lived to the fullest.
And here she is again, today. Colorful feathers in the midst of an expanse of gray.
We chat again. Me, under my new green umbrella, and her just standing in the rain with her bike. I ask whether we should maybe move under an awning. She looks at me quizzically, clearly unsure how it could matter. It takes me a moment to realize that rain doesn’t mean one tiny ounce of anything to her. Her bike gear has probably seen tens of thousand of kilometers of rain. She’s not wearing any rain gear, but now that I’m looking at it all in this new light, why would she. She’s part of her surroundings, not making any effort to isolate herself from the experience. When it rains, she gets wet. When it stops, she’ll dry.
She’s like a bird and I’m so much like a shivering little Japanese tourist on my three day annual vacation. I’m a pale, fluorescent lit fake ficus tree office decoration, and she’s a wild thing.
It’s honestly kicking my ass, contemplating all this. Rain falling all around us.
Till this moment in time I’d have told you that I’m a vagabond traveler. Wild and free, do whatever I want. And maybe try to sneak in how I make more money in a single week than I spend in an entire year. I’ve got a little OCD daily budget app that I’ve been maintaining for years, to prove it. I live in simple little apartments. I drive a kickstart motorbike. I own two pairs of pants, and about three t-shirts. Until the recent pregnancy story, nobody would know where I’ll be a month from now. How many people who can actually afford to live lavish and comfortably, chose to keep it simple?
Forget all that.
Compared to this woman, I’m the Japanese three-day tourist ficus tree. All I need now is an overpriced limited edition Leica that only takes black and white pictures, which I just post daily on my Instagram account in tiny, low Web resolution.
*sigh*
Let’s connect some dots. For the sake of this-is-an-eyeball Website.
Pop quiz. Does this woman wear glasses?
Laughable, the very notion.
And you know what?
I miss the point, for you, in about 80% of what we talk about here about eyesight health. Sure and absolutely, centimeter and diopter and managing close-up breaks and forcing your sad, kicking self to actually go outside. How many more minutes, Jake, before I can go back in? I must have a dozen new e-mails by now.
I adapt the content and delivery to our currently applicable lifestyle choices. I don’t want to be the fruitloop hippie, telling you about the evil man, and how we’re all pretty snowflakes.
But close-up ciliary strain and lens-induced axial change, that’s not what myopia is actually about.
Myopia is an expression of an imbalance of life.
That’s the real cover of the story. Not diopters or axial elongation or lens-induced or ciliary spasms. Not the optometrist bogeyman.
Myopia can happen only if you stop to look at the things that matter, and start to focus on the things that don’t. You’re not going to read a story about Jim the accountant, his 401k and brilliant old-age savings plan, and think, man, I wish that was me.
You might however have read about the wild thing riding across the world, and experienced a moment of emotion.
She doesn’t need glasses because her life is in balance. She spends most of her time looking at things that matter. Things that are REAL. Not things fabricated, packaged, filmed, turned into words and algorithmic computer decisions of stories in your Facebook timeline, on a high pixel density fancy-marketing-words screen. She’s looking out at the gray road ahead, thinking about whether to take the ferry to wherever she’s going to next.
You’re hardly ever going to see someone who is looking at the right things in life, having to wear glasses to do so.
And thus, glasses are an expression of the imbalance. We can fix the imbalance, by looking under the hood, by dissecting the contributing biological causes. We can fix the pet robot by untangling the green wire, and the red wire. Pinocchio can walk again.
But you wouldn’t need all that, or me, or any of this life un-affirming micro analysis of centimeters and diopters, if you go back to the source.
Bring life into balance. Start looking at what matters more, and what doesn’t matter, less.
Cheers,
-Jake
