~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~When I started this blog, I thought it would be easy to write something every day. My head was filled with ideas and I was enthusiastic, supported by the knowledge that this was something I could do. While I was writing or engaged in some other activity I was constantly thinking of topics I wanted to write about. Of course, I forgot to take into consideration what every adult person should know - "Expect the Unexpected". If your life takes the “normal” path, you do not grow old overnight. You don’t suddenly wake up one morning and find out that your hair has turned gray or your face has become an unrecognizable map of sags and wrinkles. It is a slow process. One day you notice a hair sprouting where it shouldn’t, a new age spot on your hand or a twinge or ache during a seemingly easy activity. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always follow a straight path. Not everyone lives to be 100 and while we are living another day something unexpected happens that knocks the wind out of us.
The last two months have been rocky for me. Not devastating, not life changing, but enough to make me take stock of my life and remember that fate may have other plans for us. Turning 60 was pretty uneventful. I didn’t go to bed one night and wake up the next morning and think, “Today I am one year older” because I wasn’t. I was one day older and nothing had changed except that I had to renew my driver’s license and I could get the senior discount at a local grocery store. It was the little things that I didn’t expect that momentarily took the wind out of my sails: the illness and death of Paws my 14 year old cat, the loss of two new Koi that we recently purchased (Jin and Clown), and most recently the death of d'Artagnan one of our three year old cats. However, the thing that had the most impact was the loss of one of my contact lenses.
Without my contacts I would probably be considered legally blind. My husband has told me several times that I would have walked off a cliff if I had been born during a time when glasses and contact lenses were non-existent. Several weeks ago, late in the afternoon on a Saturday, I dropped one of my contact lenses. This happens from time to time and my husband usually comes to the rescue and finds the missing lens. This time was different. I didn't hear the lens drop and it just vanished, never to be seen again. I wear mono-vision lenses; the left one is for reading and the right one is for seeing far away. The two lenses work together to enable me to read and see distances. I lost the right lens. I didn’t have a usable spare lens and my only pair of glasses are at least 40 years old. Without the contact lens I wasn't able to watch TV, clean, cook or work in the yard. I also wasn't able to read. I found an old pair of hard lenses that I hadn’t worn in at least ten years and used one as a temporary replacement until I could make an appointment with my eye doctor. The temporary lens irritated my eye, causing it to turn red and weep constantly, which in turn irritated the area surrounding my eye causing wrinkles to appear. By the time I went to the eye doctor on Monday afternoon, I felt like I had suddenly aged 10 years. I left the house without makeup not caring how I looked and dreading a future with impaired vision. The doctor fitted me with a temporary pair of soft lenses until my replacement lenses arrived, so I could see during the week I would be without my gas permeable lenses. I spent several frustrating days crying because the much larger lenses were impossible to get into my small aging eyes and impossible to get out because of the irritation caused by my crying.
Today I am almost back to normal. I can see things that are far away much better with my new contact lenses. I can read text on the TV and see items on grocery store shelves that were previously blurry with my old lenses. Unfortunately, the stronger new prescription has impacted my ability to read. Some days I can read the newspaper and books, while on other days the letters are twisted and blurred. And that is the point of this little story. Sometimes things happen that are life changing: an event, an accident, an occurrence that impacts the life we are living. If we are lucky, it is merely a temporary set-back, a wake-up call so we can appreciate what we have and recognize the fragility of life. For a moment I got of glimpse of what it is like to lose everything I had taken for granted.
“We tend to forget that happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.” ~Frederick Keonig
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