In which my eyes ain't what they used to be

I’m at times beset by feelings that I’m losing pieces of myself… most often my eyesight, and to a lesser extent, certain values, the acuity of my intellect, or other things that I feel might atrophy within me as left unused, or perhaps misused. Usually I do very little when I see these; perhaps some brief testing or reaching to see if these feelings indicate some real loss or not, but beyond that I don’t find myself changing much of my life on behalf of these feelings. Small things like not leaning into my computer screen so far or holding my phone farther from my face, looking at an object far away for a moment to see how the focus of my vision plays with the light coming in.

Less often than I’m struck by those feelings, my whole being is occasionally suffused with a sense of awe at the world in which I find myself. I’m captured by the slow, bright beauty of the constant movement in and around me. Now, as the sun is low already at this time of day, I’m momentarily obsessed with the long cool shadows sent stabbing out with its rays from everything around taking in its last bit of warmth before yet another long, cold night. No matter how many times I question myself, wondering whether or not a year ago perhaps I would’ve been able to read that blurry sign across the street, still this vignette that takes the place of my mind and fills the space I would’ve once thought my head to be does not fade one bit in its beauty. My awareness of this all remains as luminous as ever, whenever I should open myself to see it.

In the rapture of these moments, the cascade of the world upon my senses is an an overwhelming surge of sound, color, pressure, and more, mitigated only by my own attempts to solidify it for my grasping, all of which slow my ingestion of it briefly to a consumable rate. Though I cannot truly stem the flow of this unbridled reality into and through and over me, my efforts to do something with it narrow my awareness of it, distracting me to a point from which I can bear it while still finding myself, by finding some sense of independent control, my hands grasping firmly the dials of experience.

In my finest moments, those that move me to change those things in my life that would seem to need to change, not because I look at them and think “I need to change!” but because they simply will not remain as they are as the world to continues to move in this slow, unceasing way, in these that only arise because I have ceased to reach out for this fixing of the world and instead allowed it instead to consume me, I’m reminded of a joy of being unmatched by anything I could otherwise see or feel, and one not prone to capture or description. Not consumed by anything within the world but by the world itself, and consumed so completely that it might seem in that moment, not to me then but to me now, after, outside, that I might never return to these things at hand that expect me to remain. As soon as I’m aware that one of these moments has arisen, it’s usually too late; that awareness replaces the moment itself, and once again my hand falls on the dial, and I wonder if I might have seen the numbers on it more clearly last year than I do now.