My eyesight has cheated on me all along. Everyone who knows me even a little bit knows
that I have a myopic sight, I can
not see something beyond my nose . When I was to get married, all I could see was a house to live for me and hubby to be able to be under the same roof . In my dream
I always saw a house with green sprawling
lawn , foggy weather, white garden chairs, checked white and
red cushions on those chairs, a white china tea set ( matching the
chairs ) filled with golden tea but by
any stretch of imagination I just could not see beyond the garden and façade
of house, let alone the existence of Kitchen in the house, so when
we actually entered the house my shock
knew no bounds and I almost screamed with horror to find a kitchen looking and
bidding me with its sooty eyes
to deck it up and run it. I
realized my own near sighted ness and the meanness of people
around me to never mention it to me .
Same goes with my job . When I picked up my job of
teaching to under grads in a college , I
imagined meeting people, sitting in a staff room
which was always away from my
realm as a student , meeting young students , wielding
command over the students , dressing maturely but I just could not foresee the regular
preparation of lectures, exam
duties, checking papers , setting up lab
,taking readings, ……….as a part of regular routine work I was expected to do .
And then, I had this motherly itch to hold a cuddlesome , warm,
wooly bundle of joy , rub the cheeks against the baby’s , put the baby in pram and stroll it and my
stretch of imagination stopped right there. This is the best I could foresee about my future life, roughly about 15
months from then . So , when the baby started growing beyond 6
months, it came as another surprise to
me . I had never imagined and hence never was
prepared to deal with inoculations
, Colic,
HW, PTMs, being interrupted in the middle of any conversations, taking him to loo in every single place
I visited, be it hotels, roadside, on trains, planes, gardens, in a moving ship ( when I was
feeling motion sick myself).
If I had known better,
would I
have balked away from the idea of getting married, taking
up a job or adopted a Teddy instead ? I feel , I would have probably still treaded the same
path with little less element of surprise and may be little more preparedness and, I guess life would have been a little less
adventures more organized .
Whenever I wanted something badly I just plunged into it and later on dealt with its nuances.
That’s the rule for me.
But myopic eyesight never converted me into a bespectacled
person , how much ever I obsessed about
the mature look enabling glasses . Each
time I visited the ophthalmologist ,I was declared having a sight 6/6 , so much for being short
sighted all my life.
The wisest looking girl
in my class used to wear
oversized , oval rimmed glasses in black plastic frames . BOY! Didn’t
she look full of wisdom and maturity ? Right
from the time I was in 9th grade , I hankered for glasses like hers secretly
but since my vision betrayed me
by being perfect 6/6, I had no choice but to wait until 40 and get a
FORTY-FIED vision aka reading glasses .
It felt wonderful to have those OTC glasses resting on my nose and suddenly reading felt like a child’s play.
Yup! The letters looked huge enough as though I was reading Enid Blyton stories
for young readers. It kind of
rejuvenated my love for reading once again. Just before I got these glasses I
had given up on reading because most
letters kind of looked like the statutory warning written at the bottom
of a cigarette’s packet and who reads and takes such warnings
seriously ?
Anyway ,having lost the battle of foresight , braced with myopia ,I decided to look at life with a hind sight vision which seems to
be better cooperating and giving me some semblance of wisdom acquired in my
Forty -fied vision.
As I am treading the path of life with all its twists and turns
,as I meet people with all their idiosyncrasies and angularities in behavior ,
I have started growing some kind of
understanding and perspective. I have started
detecting love and kindness around me . I
see the inspiration radiating from
people working hard , living lives for causes, keeping their cool despite
challenges , dealing with unknown with calm ,having faith and patience to
pursue goals .
This hindsight has an advantage of being able to get you
down from the tight rope you think you
are walking on . You realize its not a tight rope but a tenterhook which bothers you most.
It’s the uncertainty which causes anxiety . My hind sighted wisdom tells me that most
often things fall in place, we rise to
the occasion, we worry more in
contemplating the problems than actually
attacking them. when the situation arose I most often found myself having no time to
mull over and had to spring into action
whether I was prepared for it or not.
No amount of foresight would have helped me to know in advance that some people in
life would look at me for support , I would be responsible for their well being , I would be anchoring their lives
.And what I once felt were mere words would be sought by some and from some by me (words like “don’t
worry , I am with you , everything will be fine” ) and we would have unwavering faith on those words.
The fortified vision has enabled me with a hell lot of
reassurance about myself. I care less about opinions of strangers .I know they
have better things to worry about like catching a bus , paying telephone bill
on time or fixing a leaking tap at home than paying attention to my looks.
Now I know that when
my husband insists on Corn flakes being
kept always in its original cardboard box
and never be decanted into
another plastic jar , he is just being
he , a husband having some
innocuous maverick idea ,he has absolutely
no disrespect for my Pearlpet jars.
Now I know that when husband asks me to “ go get a proper hair cut”, he is not
undermining the freedom of looks of
entire feminine population , he just means it about me because he can not
stand my disheveled hair look.
Now I know that whenever
kid -2 has some HW to do , he
needs a washroom break within 2 minutes of starting up and I am patient
because I know , he is being he , a 9 year old
whose motor controls are better at video games than holding a pencil and
he is absolutely not against forced learning.
Now I know that when parents worry about my not calling them
up often enough , it's none of my business to teach them not to worry
but understand that they are just
being parents .
Now I know that when I worry about my hostler son who does not respond to mails , takes
phone calls in the ratio of 1:10 , I am not supposed to get angry ,he is just
being a young fella surrounded by others his age and has a whole new world open
to him to explore. Also , I am not angry with myself because I can not help
feeling anxious about his unresponsiveness because I know that I am being ‘me’ , an
extension counter of emotions my parents
are.
The hind sighted vision has taught me to not try to
read too much out of people or
situation. Read the plain and simple ,
consider everything else is written in Chinese .
