Last month I bought a pair of blue light filtering reading glasses. I get migraines and while I tend to don my sunglasses when that happens during a meeting, which helps a ton, I thought it might be a good idea to engage with some preventative measures. Plus I was bored and clicking through one of those lists of Oprah’s 25 favorite things available on Amazon and here we are. So I got these glasses to wear during the 87 zoom meetings I have each week. I put them on and wonder of wonders I could see the screen SO MUCH MORE CLEARLY. It was great and I didn’t get headaches during meetings. I started wearing the glasses whenever I used my computer and it was awesome. I found myself reading articles more than skimming them. And then one afternoon I was in bed reading a book and I realized that the text was hard to see so I went to get my glasses and voilà, I could read easily. I have always been a bookworm, but for the past few years I have been reading less and less. I put it down to being busy and that I’d read too much so new books were boring, but suddenly that day it dawned on me that maybe I had begun to read less because it was getting harder to see. I had already discovered that the type on the shampoo bottles had gotten too small for me to read, but that’s not a big deal as lather, rinse, repeat is pretty simple. Sometimes at the store I had to have our daughter read the label on a package, but it had never dawned on me that maybe I needed reading glasses. So I dug out a pair of reading glasses I had gotten in the late 90’s to help with headaches and have been wearing them to read and it is awesome.
I tell this story because for me it brings up the great truth that often in life we make up other reasons for things rather than get to the bottom of what is really going on. I’ve always had great vision and was weirdly proud of that fact, so to wear glasses all the time now for working and reading means admitting that I’m older and my body is slowly wearing out as I move toward inevitable death. Deciding that I don’t like reading as much because I’ve read tons of books so everything now is trite and predictable is way better for my ego. In denying the reality of my aging eyes, not only did I not have to admit my own mortality, I got to be smugly superior to other people, especially authors.
Where else in our lives do we come up with reasons for things that aren’t as painful to admit as the truth?
In my line of work one of the great questions we struggle with is, why aren’t people coming to church? I honestly had one church decide it was because the door wasn’t in the middle of the building. If only they could remodel and move the door than people would come flooding back. In their minds their shrinking numbers had nothing to do with their value of niceness over real conversation, lack of ability to welcome new folks into community, or their total disengagement from the rest of the city. It was so much easier to with for a building change than to actually change their culture . Over time they were able to recognize some of what was going on and made shifts, but it is a lesson for me in how sometimes the solutions we dream up for our problems don’t always get to the heart of the matter.
So this week as we as a country continue to talk about defunding police and renaming our schools and how to change our racist systems we need to look at the heart of our racist society and work to change our individual patterns and behaviors. The police exist in the way they do because we as a society have chosen to invest in enforcement and punishment rather than in social services. We’d rather have someone write a ticket for a broken taillight than pay for people to help our neighbors change their taillights. What does that say about us and how we need to change so that Black lives actually do come to matter to us a whole? It’s going to be painful to admit how much some of us have insulated ourselves, and while some of the external fixes like changing names or taking down statues are important, the real shift will only come when we do the deep work of realizing what is really going on in our own choices about how we live.
I wish Oprah had glasses that helped us see that.
Eilidh
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