Two days ago, Dr. Z removed the cataract in my right eye and implanted a new lens. I was groggy through the procedure and mostly experienced it as a shape and color show. No pain, just a sense of bright colors and shapes unfolding above me, like living within a Kandinsky painting.
Now the scratchiness is gone, my follow-up visit showed that everything is going in the right direction, and I can see out of both eyes, though the vision in my right eye is still fuzzy.
So, I can close my left eye and see life without a cataract, albeit still fuzzy, through my right eye; and I can close my right eye and see life pretty much as I saw it before. Next month, Dr. Z will remove the cataract in my left eye, too.
Before I continue, let me tell you that I thought I had been seeing just fine. Yes, the trees in the distance on the roadside had gotten blurrier, and the optometrist told me that my glasses could only partially correct my vision, but, by and large, I wasn’t paying much attention to the leaves on the distant trees in any detail.
Yet, when an artist’s eyes are getting worse, when objective evidence confirms that they are getting worse, when you’re already old and the longer you wait the older you get, maybe you should nip it in the bud, so to speak, and go ahead with the surgery.
So, I did. And now I can see life before and after at the same time.
The surprise is how different they are. With the right eye, clouds are white and the sky is bright blue. With my left eye, clouds are a dirty yellow and the sky is grayish-green. Before my surgery, the visual world as I knew it was tinted yellow-brown.
But my brain said something else: My brain told me that yellow-brown clouds were white, and that grayish-green is blue. My cataracts had created a new normal. Rather than realizing that my eyes had changed and the world had stayed the same, I would have sworn that the way I perceived the world was the reality.
Which brings me to the question: What is reality? Is there an objective reality out there that exists independent of our senses, or is reality subjective—whatever it is that any sentient creature has the apparatus to perceive? As Ed Yong wrote in his book, “An Immense World,” every creature lives within its own universe, its own “Umveldt.” So, “reality,” as we know it, is both subjective and incomplete.
It is not often, however, that we can simultaneously experience two “Umveldts” at roughly the same time. The difference is startling, but also illuminating.
If I were walking with a friend who remarked, “Oh the sky is so blue today,” and my brain wasn’t telling me that grayish-green is really blue, because we all know that clear skies are blue, then we could get into an argument. In other words, my brain would have to correct the mistake my eyes were making for me to be in harmony with how that particular reality is labeled, and, for the most part, seen by others.
Yet, if I paid attention only to what my eyes told me, no one could convince me that what I saw was blue, rather than grayish-green. After all, what I was seeing was grayish-green. The problem was that my apparatus had what we would consider a flaw, a bias toward yellow-brown.
The one reality that we might be able to agree on is that we all see through our own lenses. If we were able to see through multiple lenses at the same time, it seems to me that we might be able to solve many of the world’s problems. We would build highways that take into account how and whether other lives—human and otherwise—would be affected, for example. Or draw boundaries that would consider their effects on the communities they would contain or exclude. Or distribute family tasks more equitably, or recognize when someone needs understanding rather than blame.
The Magic Egg
Before I retired, I was an academic psychologist with a small private practice. Some of my patients were couples. In my office, I had a silver candy dish on which sat a life-sized marble egg, a gift from a friend. This was the magic egg.
The magic egg had a ritual: Whoever held the magic egg had the floor. They could say whatever was on their mind and their partner would listen. When the person holding the egg had finished, they passed the egg to the other person, whose job was to repeat back what they understood the other had said. Then the first person would correct whatever the partner had not gotten quite right, and the partner would repeat back the correction.
Then the partner got the egg.
As you can imagine, this broke a lot of ice, sometimes with everyone ending up laughing. But it also served a deeper purpose, not of solving every problem, but of shifting points of view from “My way or the highway” to “Maybe you have another way of seeing this.” The not-so-magic egg opened a process for hearing each other and hopefully becoming better able to work things out.
Many human problems are solved bit by bit, in a series of mini adjustments over time rather than as an “Aha!” moment. The gift of the single cataract correction was that I was able to see that misperceptions can also happen bit by bit, so imperceptibly that I wasn’t even aware of the change. But only by being able to look through another lens was I able to see where my reality had skidded off the tracks. If there is any lesson I have learned from this experience, it is to pay attention to the differences; to the differences between what I expect to happen and what does happen; to how I perceive things and how others perceive them; to how the assumptions from my experiences differ from the assumptions from others’ experiences.
Life is a work in process, one that requires—with or without the help of a magic egg—our willingness and capacity to keep looking through and sharing different lenses.
