Keeping sight of what is important

I recently expe­ri­enced a rather painful injury to my left eye.  My 7 month old man­aged to poke me in the eye while we were play­ing, and I ended up with a 5mm corneal abra­sion.  While not an incred­i­bly seri­ous injury, a 5mm corneal abra­sion (dead cen­ter on the eye, mind you) is very painful and it dras­ti­cally reduces your abil­ity to see.  It hurts to blink, it hurts not to blink.  You end up in a con­stant state of try­ing to find the least painful direc­tion to look, and the dark­est cor­ner of the room in which to do it.  Due to the late­ness of the hour, I had to wait until morn­ing to see an eye doc­tor and by the time morn­ing finally came, I was in agony.  To put it bluntly, the expe­ri­ence totally sucked.

I must admit that I did find some value in the expe­ri­ence, how­ever.  When nearly every aspect of your daily life relies on your abil­ity to see rel­a­tively clearly, los­ing that abil­ity stops you in your tracks.  This might sound a bit obvi­ous, but it is dif­fi­cult to truly under­stand it with­out expe­ri­enc­ing it first hand.  You find your­self rely­ing on your other senses to help you get through the day.  Feel­ing your way around, lis­ten­ing for the dog so you don’t step on the poor thing, hop­ing you remem­ber where the cof­fee table is.  You end up rely­ing more and more on your other senses to get you through the day, espe­cially the sense of touch.

It was the act of feel­ing my way down the hall to find the bath­room that gave me the idea behind this arti­cle.  Dur­ing our nor­mal day to day lives, many of us sim­ply go about our rou­tines.  We have goals that we seek to achieve, and most of us approach our goals with famil­iar and obvi­ous method­ol­ogy.  This may get the job done, but could we be miss­ing some­thing?  I def­i­nitely think so.