Learning to see

I’ll never forget when I was first told I needed to wear glasses.

I was about nine years old and I had been squinting at my teachers in school for months. I strained to see what they wrote on the board, without much success. My dad was a Glasses Wearer, but my only personal experience with glasses was ordering fake X-ray glasses from the back of a comic book when I was younger.

Come to find out, my eyesight was terrible. Something like 20/400.

When I was given my first pair of real glasses, on one hand it was like a breath of fresh air: I could see clearly, finally. No more squinting, no more headaches, no more feeling lost. On the other hand, I was shocked that this is what I would look like from now on. Forever. My new glasses were huge – taking up half of my small face!

I was a shy kid when I was this young. The self-scrutiny of what I would now look like as a Glasses Wearer overshadowed the fact that I could see. So I refused to wear them at first. I was just too self-conscious.

Slowly, I wore them for short periods of time. But even at that young age I was quick to tell people they were just for reading, not for wearing all day every day. Of course I’m not a Glasses Wearer! I play sports and do active things! Glasses Wearers don’t do things like that!

Eventually, I came all the way around and relented. I wasn’t happy about it, but I joined the Glasses Wearers Club.

Many years later now, I’m married to a wife who has 20/20 vision. I also have five children, none of whom wear glasses on a daily basis. I like to remind them they are so fortunate to just wake up with sight.

It must be an amazing thing to just wake up and be able to see the world clearly.

My eyesight has gotten bad enough over the years that I wear both contact lenses and reading glasses while at my computer now. I can’t see things clearly that are far away without contacts. I can’t see things clearly that are close up without reading glasses.

Seeing things clearly changes everything.

When you look at others, what do you see? Do you see differences or similarities?

When someone dresses differently from you, styles their hair differently from you, walks differently, talks differently, or just views the world differently than you, does that change how you see them or talk to them or…talk about them?

I’ve learned that seeing people on a deeper level is just a choice. It’s really just that simple. You can choose to get hung up on the differences or focus on the similarities.

Seeing others this way starts with curiosity.

In the words of novelist Wendell Berry, “You have to develop your imagination to the point that permits sympathy. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours or the lives of your loved ones or the lives of your neighbors. You have to have at least enough imagination to understand that if you want the benefits of compassion, you must be compassionate.”

Before stumbling upon those words a few months ago, I would have never pondered how imagination has anything to do with charity. I’ve thought a lot about it since.

It’s true that some people are hard to like, let alone love. But we have to start somewhere if we’re going to stop some of the nonsense that’s going on in the world today. Some of us are going to have to be a little more curious about people who aren’t our clones.

A great place to start is your neighborhood, because everyone there has one thing in common: you chose that very specific place to live out of the endless options.

Whether it was the price of the homes (or the rental rate), the square footage, location, quality of the nearby schools, proximity to parks, the surrounding geography — whatever it was, you all chose that neighborhood.

Pew Research suggests Americans ages 65 and older are more likely than those ages 18 to 29 to say they know most of their neighbors (34% vs. 20%). In contrast, about a quarter (23%) of adults under 30 don’t know any of their neighbors.

So let that be your starting point in learning to see things through the eyes of others.

Put it on the plan for this week to go meet someone on your block.