Only once have I ever experienced a moment of despair. In my optimism, I hope that most people never have even one, but I may be misguided about that.
Mine occurred during the healing process from my retinal detachment. I had avoided opening my eye since the surgery, and for the most part from looking in mirrors. But at one point, curiosity got the better of me. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, and slowly opened my eye. I had had a scleral buckle placed around my eyeball and had gas injected into my eye. I had been leaning to the side for too long, to let the retina re-attach, and I guess I wanted to see what it looked like. I opened my eye as far as the underused lid would go.
I was horrified by the zombie eye that looked back at me. Bloodshot, half-closed, and despair-inducing. I felt sick to the core, not from the bloody look of the thing but from the existential fear that this was the permanent look of my eye. Would it ever heal, or would my eye forever be seen as belonging to one of the hated cannibals from The Walking Dead? Would I even regain anything like normal sight? As I looked out through the gas bubble, the world resembled the view from being partially submerged in pool water, neither fully underwater or fully in the air.
I’m happy to report that it did, in fact, heal, and looking at me, you would never know what happened. I have lost some peripheral vision (because I waited too long to call the ophthalmologist, so don’t make that mistake!) and, because the gas bubble and medications gave me a cataract, I received a corrective lens implant (in both eyes). I’m at a café writing this, and can see both the screen and the people around me clearly—better than I could for decades (after getting glasses at age 8).
As for the glimpses of Enlightenment: they have happened more frequently in my life. Sometimes at church services, feeling a true spiritual connection to the world, in private meditation (a practice I really should resume), or when looking at an amazing work of art in a museum. These are called satori, and last only a brief moment, teasing you with the Oneness of the Universe before plunging you back into what I often call “what sometimes passes for reality.”
I wish you many of the latter and none of the former, and hope that any glimpse of enlightenment is not followed by despair.
MUSOFYR 