I didn't mean to write this weekend, but when I saw the topics galenkp suggested for this weekend: If you went blind overnight, what aspects of your life would you miss the most and why? I remembered a conversation I had with a friend a few months ago.
A cheerful, young, smart woman whom I have known for over ten years and with whom I have a friendly relationship, she often complains to me about something unpleasant and ugly, as well as sad in her life. We met one day for coffee, we hadn't seen each other for a long time before that, and although in the meantime we heard each other regularly, both she and I know that some situations cannot be conveyed in a telephone conversation. And during that conversation, while drinking coffee, a story related to this week's topic came up.
She has an autoimmune disease and has been battling multiple sclerosis for years. I know about this condition of hers and for years I have been hearing about the symptoms she experienced and her conditions, and that day she told me about the partial loss of her vision, which she had a few weeks before our meeting. I don't know how she thought it was a partial vision loss, when she had 100% vision loss in one eye and only 20% vision in the other. Almost total blindness.
And in her case, the fear she described then led her to a complete mental breakdown. Her father, when she was a child, lost his sight overnight. Loss of vision, which is defined as a symptom of MS, she expected, but when darkness developed before her eyes, she realized how her father felt, and how he still feels to this day. When she was younger, she told me that she listened to the stories of her father, who tried to comfort her (and probably himself), that losing his sight is not the end, that it is just a continuation of the journey in a different way, in which he will have to continue to learn and get to know the world around him in a different way. He then mentioned to her the sayings of some ancient sages and philosophers The most difficult thing in the world is the blindness of the soul, not the blindness of the eye. (Seneca)
Blindness is not darkness, it is just another way of life. (Homer)
And certainly, with the loss of sight, which is probably the most important human sense, he lost his "connection" with the outside world, through which he used to get almost all the information from his surroundings, so in his following years he had to learn how to rely on his other senses, touch, hearing, smell and taste, in order to obtain information that he used to get with his sight. But how can we use other senses to see the faces of loved ones, the colors of the sunset, beautiful landscapes, recognize signposts on the side of the road...
I tried the other day, while watching a domestic series on TV with well-known actors (which I myself had already watched), which was adapted for blind people, by closing my eyes, to virtualize the action spoken by the narrator, but the images that came before my eyes were not as they really are in that series. Much like when I listen to a live broadcast of a football game on the radio, the director of that game is my imagination, with the sequence of action spoken by the announcer.
When the sense of sight is dulled, the other senses become precious, space feels different, people are recognized by the sound of their footsteps, by their voice and smell, and the memories we have become precious. Those images that we have engraved in our memory become our comfort and we pull them out of our memory as inspiration for the connection with what we learn through other senses.
Loss of sight, like any other sense or health in general, is probably the hardest thing that can happen to someone, and I can associate that loss with the curse "May God grant that you may have, and that you may lose". Because the one who spent half his life looking at the world with his eyes will feel the loss of all the strength of such a curse, because only then will he realize that sight, a possibility he acquired at birth, he took for granted, as something that is normal...
Maybe it's easier, I'm not saying it is, but that's how it seems to me, when someone is born without the sense of sight, blind, and who has never seen the blue of the sky, the color of a flower, the faces of his parents, brothers and sisters, his loved ones and his neighbors and friends. He is not aware of what he has lost, because he never had it.
And to approach this topic with my personal opinion, let me say: Losing my sight overnight, my life would be turned upside down. As a person who is good at nature, who likes to explore everything around him, to walk and to see with his eyes (as well as with his camera), storing in his memory some of the most beautiful pictures that the eye can see, probably that aspect - harmonizing the environment, would be something that would be the hardest for me. Probably now, I can say, in the old days, I would somehow learn to read Braille, I would learn how to virtualize the contours of the face of the person I meet by touch (when I become close to her, so much so that she allows me to lay my jacket on her face 🙂), I would certainly sharpen my sense of hearing and smell, smells would be more intense, sounds would be richer and touch more sensual... The world around me would become audible, smellable and tangible 🙂
And what I would miss the most, I could and had to only imagine, because I would no longer be able to see the sky, clouds, sun and moon, mountains, seas, lakes, a bird in flight, a beautiful girl on the street and the color of a flower in a garden.
Or just a tree and a piece of cloudy sky outside my window:
For the rest of my life, I would regret what I had and lost.
But I would never give up. I don't know how and if I would succeed, but I would try to remain an active Hiver, dedicated to some communities of a more literary nature, with the fact that I would have to improve blind typing, and learn how to find the button for "Listen to post" and the button for writing new posts and the button for Publish 🙂
Now that got me interested... I know that in the Hive world there are people with serious health problems who bravely fight with what has befallen them, and is there anyone who has visual impairment? I believe there are no blind people here after all...