Regaining My Vision 8-14-12

Anderson, South Carolina


At one time I prided myself on having especially acute vision. I recall being able to see the most minute of details. I could even place a newspaper on the floor between my feet and easily read it while sitting upright in a chair. A few retina surgeries and the realities of aging conspired to truncate my clarity. It’s an ongoing annoyance to be switching between eyeglasses, losing them, squinting at micro-print on packaging and maps. It was more than an annoyance coming home from Russia to have urgent retina surgery the day of my return. As my retinas disintegrate and I age, the lenses in my eyes harden, and ocular muscles responsible for altering their shape for close vision meet increasing resistance, leaving me clueless as to where I am on the map.

Even more problematic than ophthalmic challenges is the loss of spiritual vision deriving from being in familiar comfortable surroundings for too long. It becomes so easy for me to be myopic, paying little attention to the realities beyond boundaries of my vision. As we age we become set in our ways, ossified, resisting change, and like many, I cry ‘foul’ when subjected to the vortex of change I see around me.

One of the great joys of travel for me has been encountering the novel, unfamiliar, and unique. Even inability to understand language can facilitate an objective observer status, often useful to photographers. One’s role as a tourist is by definition brief, making such a role manageable in the short term and it doesn’t require any disruptions at home. I’m finding more people around me becoming resistant to travel of more than a week at a time. Many see two weeks as akin to the sound barrier. Almost universally when I’ve invited other to make journeys of three or more weeks, they decline out of hand and those who’ve accepted generally had difficulty as time elapsed. The overwhelming urge to scurry home at great cost has proven problematic more than once. Not long ago, I offered a free thirty-day journey anywhere in the world via first class jet at no cost to anyone who could give me a good reason for going anywhere of his or her choice. I had no response whatever. I made the journey solo.

Extended duration journeys allow one to move from an observer status to a full participant in a culture, presuming language barriers have been surmounted. Paradoxically, immersion in a foreign culture often grants renewed vision for my own culture. With the prospect of a long extended journey to the other side of the world comes a stunning instantaneous clarity for my own circumstances. The perfunctory task of buying a deck of airline boarding passes made this a reality in my mind, no longer mere imagination. A curious prodromal absence makes my heart grow fonder at the now-real prospect of extended absence from the familiar. In the two days since I committed to deliberate long absence I find myself looking more closely at the flowers blooming in my yard, knowing they will be long frozen in winter memories upon my return. I cut the grass mindfully, wanting to enjoy its remaining summer warmth.

I recall the radical change in my perspective and attitudes of gratitude regarding such things as pavement, curbs, signal lights, and public safety after working in Haiti during a season of great civil unrest, where these things were non-existent. At the same time I was in awe at the public sense of community existing in a place where little else was to be found. I’m reminded of the same feelings when in Indonesia following the vast disruptions of the social order following the fall of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto. I wasn’t used to machine guns being waved in front of me. I remember suddenly being overwhelmed with the 11,000 miles between me and the familiar. Decades later I recall the staggering volcanic beauty found on Sumatra. Middle Eastern memories include fighter jets making strafing runs and drivers with inconceivable anger towards others unlike themselves. Mixed in are memories of some of the most sublime archeological sites on earth. Gratitude has many ways of emerging in our lives.

As I anticipate travel to one of the world’s gentler and more benevolent lands I know I can expect to experience a fusion of positive and negative. I’m better for the experience of mixture I find in every land. It gives me increased clarity to see the concoction in my own land. Happily, the blend on this journey is likely to be heavily weighted to the positive and affirming.

I can only hope I’m better for the experience when it’s all said and done; even more grateful for what I have right here today. Even the opportunity to have my retinas fixed the day I got home.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.

Blessings,

Craig C. Johnson