Vision Changes

My wife has promised herself that today she will finally attend to her worsening eyesight and get "real" glasses following a "real" eye examination. I rejoice for her as I know from almost 30 years of glasses wearing that the benefit is worth the inconvenience. In fact, about 5 years ago my eyes had aged to the point that I required "transitional" lenses. ;-) I was musing about all this and wondering what I would write today and I fell into the topic of vision changes. Certainly, I would be significantly impaired if I lost my glasses. I am both near sighted and astigmatic to the point that I would be severely limited in activities of daily life if I didn't wear corrective lenses. There's more to this topic of vision changes than just an exploration of my optometric needs - there's a spiritual issue as well. I was watching and listening to the President's State of the Union address the other night, and I was struck by how he chose to open (and close) his report. While I knew that this talk would be a "stump speech" to a degree, I was struck by how militaristic it was. With so many problems and so much discord in so many areas, to spend the amount of time on the Department of Defense seemed to me to be a lack of vision. I've thought more about this over the days and find that the President's vision has changed. Vision is made up of three components: visual integrity (of which acuity is one measure), efficiency and information processing. Integrity deals with the health of the eye, efficiency with how both eyes can accomodate to different visual stimuli and how they work together, and information processing with how what we see is interpreted by our brains. I suspect that the President has suffered changes to all three parts of his vision and I wonder how to help him correct the changes. Maybe it's a prescription for transitional lenses to allow for seeing much farther into the future than simply November 2012. It is also a need to have the time to process what is being seen in order to interpret it appropriately. We all know that eye witnesses of the same event can have widely different interpretations of exactly what happened. Scientists tell us that we tend to see what we expect to see. This is not the fact that we actually don't see what happened, but the manner in which the information is processed is different based on an individuals experiences. Religious faith can help us to interpret what we see and hear. A person who is grounded in a belief of how we should all be working together and leaving no one behind will interpret a new piece of information very differently than someone who believes that the world was created for them to have as much as they can acquire. A spiritual focus can improve all aspects of our vision and allow us to accomodate better to changing times - since the message of G-d does not change. Our eyes notice things that they didn't see before, and our vision tends to be sharper and more focused. I'd like you all to spend some time evaluating your vision this week. How has your vision changed and what do you need to do to get your integrity, efficiency and information processing back to "normal"? Let us know how we at Possibilities Journey Inc (www.possjrny.org) can help you with this part of your trip. Peace, Dan