[A photo of me on my back deck. I have short blonde hair and dark blue glasses on. I am wearing my sunflower dress. My hair has remnants of lavender dye I put in it. You can see my Virginia Pine Tree in the background.]
At vision therapy, my vision therapist told me that an important part of our journey is forgiveness.
With my own journey, I have had many different viewpoints on forgiveness. I have blogged them and written about it in journals and my books.
I bristled because of where I am on my current journey in my personal life. I am not ready to forgive someone significant in my life right now.
I listened to what my vision therapist had to say, though, and I came away with a new definition of forgiveness that I want to share.
He said that forgiveness means to let go of something that was taking up significant space inside us. And then, we will have room for the next thing to come in there to take up the space.
He said it much more eloquently. But that was the general idea.
Essentially - let go of the thing that is bothering you, so that there is room for something good to come in and fill that space.
Isn't that a beautiful definition of forgiveness? I love this idea. It's a definition of forgiveness that I can easily embrace.
When I was a little girl, I got a blue pair of Wonder Woman glasses. Because I was diagnosed with a "Lazy Eye," (one eye wandering, while the other eye stays focussed on what I am looking at) the eye doctor put tape on the outside of my glasses. This was supposed to draw my eye back in because it would be looking through blurry tape and not seeing clearly. I haven't had those kid glasses since the early 80s. So I re-created what I'm talking about on my brand new pair of glasses.
I walked around for years wearing scotch tape on my glasses. So many people asked me, "why do you have tape on your glasses?" "Did your glasses break?" I was horribly embarrassed by this. I would answer confidently that I had a lazy eye and it was supposed to help me see better.
I went to my new eye doctor, who in this blog I am going to refer to as Dr. Magic, for the first time 2 weeks ago. On my second visit, he asked me to look at him and tell him what I saw. I told him he was moving in a "U" shape. And I indicated that with my arm.
He said he was going to put tape on my glasses. I thought, "here we go again." I told him: "yes, I used to wear tape on my glasses when I was a little girl."
Dr. Magic asked me, "where was it?" I told him: "on the outside 1/2 of my glasses or so."
He nodded and proceeded to put tape on my glasses. When he was done, they looked like this. (I took this photo - I always set them on the table upside down. So, they are upside down.) They are sitting on top of one of my many notebooks. This is my own artwork as the cover of the notebook.
Well, he handed the glasses back to me with the tape barely on the inside of my eyes. "That's unusual," I thought.
I put the glasses on and I looked at him. He asked me "what changed?"
I looked at him for quite a while. Then I said, "you're not moving anymore!"
It was exciting and also a bit weird. I hadn't really noticed that every time I looked at something, it was always flickering back and forth and rocking in "U" shape.
This simple fix made my life go from a moving ship to stillness. Wow.
I hadn't gotten around to putting this tiny tape on my new pair of glasses. As I typed up this blog post, I went ahead and added it now to my brand new pair of 3D magic glasses. So - here they are. My brand new pair of glasses. With scotch tape on them. haha.
I had been typing this blog with one eye closed. But I just got the tape on these and now I can type with both eyes open. What a miracle a proper pair of glasses can be, even if they need a tad bit of scotch tape on them.
