A Lens for your Perspective

"Lenses and Screens," 2014. Photo: Vinster

Everyone views life through a lens.

I happen to also view life through the more conventional lens of glass and whatever plasticy thing contact lens are made of. Being almost legally blind, I have the privilege of having both glasses and contact lens to help me see. And while both are prescribed by my optometrist to give me 20-20 vision, I find that the vision I experience when I wear glasses is quite different from the vision I experience when I wear contacts.

Glasses give a narrower field of vision. My peripheral vision is marked by frames that signal the beginning of a haze of blurred figures and washed out profiles. With contacts, I can see more of the world but often encounter a distortion from the tears my eyes produce to get rid of the foreign plasticky invader. NO EYES. THATS NOT A DUST PARTICLE. THAT'S HELPING ME SEE SO DEAL WITH IT!

So even though my glasses and contacts give me 20-20 vision, my experience of my world changes based on whether I am wearing heated sand or plastic on my eyes. So what is truly real? How do I know that the person I like is as beautiful as I see? How do I know that the friends I laugh with aren't hiding an inner pain? How do I know that there aren't ghosts peering over my shoulder right now?

I don't really have good answers to these questions, but I believe them to be largely irrelevant. I believe though that everyone views life through a lens. What I see and deem as beautiful may not be beautiful to another. A joke that I see as funny may not be seen as funny by another. A solitary desk may look normal to me but may look haunted to another.

So what do we do with the infinite number of lenses and viewpoints we encounter in our daily lives? I think if we begin to acknowledge each other's filters and remove our own lenses, we can discover some amazing things in common we have with each other. I believe we will find beauty in beautiful things and pain in painful things. Any differences that come up can be used as accents that further deepen and clarify our pictures of the world.

Everyone views life through a lens. But that shouldn't stop us from sharing our world with each other.