Friday, May 4, 2012

In the Dark

I've worn contact lenses for years. I used to hate putting them on. Always seemed to be a struggle. Until a discovery I made last year: we went on a camping trip and I brought with me a portable mirror. It happened to be one with a lot of magnification. I used it to put my lenses on and all of a sudden I could see what I was doing! On a regular mirror I only saw enough to make sure I wasn't putting the lenses on my nose. But with the magnification I could actually see exactly where in my eye I had to put each lens. And now that I could see, putting the lenses on the right place became trivial. I had been in putting my lenses on "in the dark" for years!

We don't put enough value on having good light. It makes an incredible difference. For example, even though I need reading glasses, if I have supper good light, for example, being outdoor on a sunny day and wearing high quality sun glasses, I can read without reading glasses.

How many other things do we do in the dark? Try to improve our swimming, dribbling or tacking... How much easier does it get if we can see exactly what we are doing wrong? See it when we get it right?  I am a big fun of videos and mirrors... We are also often in the dark on non-physical issues: having problems in a relationship but don't really understand what the other person is thinking? What they see in us that might be an issue... Struggling to learn something or change a behavior but don't understand, because we can't see, what is holding us back...

We should often ask ourselves if we have enough light, enough visibility, into what we are doing. When we enter a dark house we instinctively know that we can't see where we are going and that we have to turn on the lights to avoid bumping into stuff. Yet somehow we don't easily recognize darkness in other aspects of our life - and end up bumping into "stuff" for years.