you do not know how others see the world

Having just spent the week with a brand new lens in my right eye which corrects my vision and is crystal clear and my decades-old lens in my left eye which has needed glasses for over 30 years and has still got a well-developed cataract has been – may I say it? – an eye-opening experience.

All week, I’ve been shutting one eye then the other back and forth like a child playing with a fascinating new toy. Cataracts are a normal part of aging. Yes, I’ve aged to the point of having some serious cataracts but childlike wonder never goes away. Everything this past week has been yellow-and-out-of-focus versus brilliant-brightness-and-vivid-clarity. This coming week I’ll have the left eye done and soon, within weeks I suppose, I will not be able to remember this difference.

Naturally, it makes me hyper-aware of one of those things in life that is so obvious but that we nearly always overlook. We all see the world through our own actual and metaphorical lens. Put another way, we see the same thing, say a piece of furniture, and we both identify it as such – a maple colored wooden rocking chair. But in fact, we have no way of knowing what your maple color is compared to mine. We have no way of knowing how clearly you can make out the pattern on the chair cushion or the strands of fabric on the stuffed animal sitting on the chair. Still, we both agree, readily, that what we’re looking at is the same thing.

This is true for all our agreements: the speed limit, the meaning of forgiveness, the flavor of an orange, the importance of making your bed. It doesn’t matter that we all do the same things or eat the same things or even believe the same things. Each of us is unique. We believe in our own way and we make the mistake of thinking that others who agree with us believe what we believe.

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3/9/2026