The middle distance
I got a new pair of glasses recently, and it had been so long since my last new prescription that it took me several weeks to get used to them. A new prescription is weird: everything is clearer, but somehow the ground looks both closer and farther away. The lines around objects are suddenly sharp—so sharp they look like they’re in 3D.
I always feel like a new prescription is like springtime, where you start to notice the haze of green over once-brown branches in the distance. Seeing with new eyes isn’t just a figure of speech when you’ve got those fancy new spectacles on your face.
I’ve been thinking a lot about working in the middle distance. For me, that’s where my vision is sharpest with these new glasses, where objects nearly vibrate in their clarity. I’ve always been farsighted, so while I can see things that are close, they’re often less clear than items in the distance. And yet, as I get older, I really can’t read without my glasses, and trying to read road signs from any distance is iffy.
When I went in for my last eye appointment, the doctor started asking questions about reading, how blurry it was, when I had trouble seeing my phone.
“How old are you?” (like he didn’t know, he had my chart in front of him)
40
“Yup. You’ll want to get yourself a pair of readers for when you wear your contacts.”
Dang it.
Turns out, the middle distance works just fine for me.
So much of my life up to this point has been planning and worrying, and then getting so sick of the worrying that I completely throw all caution to the wind and dive in on the first thing that looks good.
That’s what it feels like. But if I look a bit deeper, with a more positive stance, perhaps even optimistic about my past (is that a thing one can do?), then perhaps all of that worrying and planning actually set me up to see the right thing when it came along?
Last night I submitted some poetry to a lit magazine. I have been working on it a while, but hadn’t pulled the trigger yet. But I heard something interesting on a podcast regarding change: What I am capable of right now might not be what I’m capable of later. We assume that we will be the same person tomorrow, after the change took place, but of course we’ll be someone different by that point.
What was the difference between me yesterday, who was thinking about going out on a limb with a poetry submission, and the me of today, who send the email?
Not much. Except she’s trying to be somewhere in between yesterday and tomorrow.