An Aha! moment with new glasses

Hi All

I have been experiencing difficulty with my spectacles, which I wear all day, all the time.

A few months ago I became aware that I could see much better with my reading glasses than with my graduated lenses, which are now over two years old. The world through my readers (with the same close up prescription) looked like an over-sharpened Photoshop image, with very clearly defined, almost pixelated edges to everything, and I wasn't sure which was more accurate. Maybe I just spend too many hours of the day looking at pixels on a computer screen. ;-)

Off to the optician. It turns out that the non-reflective coating on my old glasses had become crazed, probably from our summer heat, where it is often over 40 degrees in the shade during summer, and considerably hotter in the sun. I had been experiencing the world for the last 12 months in increasingly soft focus, like a portrai taken with a portrait lens, which is designed to soften hard features on faces in the finished photo, without losing detail. It was my version of rose-coloured glasses.

Rose coloured or not, it was making detailed tasks in low light environments impossible. I eventually figured that other people don't wander around wearing a head torch for half the day. Maybe it wasn't OK for me to do the same?

I now have my new, everyday glasses (same old prescription) and I find that my view of the world is very detailed again, just like my readers, which somehow now look 'normal' as my eyes have adjusted to the hyper-detail that I now see all day, and my brain is now filtering out the 'pixelation' and detail overkill.

I can now see dirt and fluff that I literally could not see a week ago. I could not see my own environment, and what needed cleaning up, because I was living in a world where the detail was hidden from me, glasses or not. I am now more critical of the world around me and have started doing something about the mess! (like tidying my eyebrows this morning, for a start!)

So, next time you see an elderly person with food dribbles on the front of their clothes or a grubby collar, try not to be critical of them, and think they are turning into a dirty old person. They probably can't see the splop.

Perhaps we should be a little less critical of all the small stuff? Is the world a worse place because we can see people's breakfast on their shirt? Does a smudge on a shirt collar mean anything? Does it matter if our lipstick is not *absolutely* precise? Does the fluff on the bathroom floor make us into unhygienic slobs?

So get your glasses checked occasionally, even if the prescription is OK. After all, we cannot see what we cannot see. (Help an old person to get to the optician to get theirs checked too.)

And don't forget to give an old person a hug, despite the menu on their shirt. Hold your breath if you need to. Old people need touch and affection, no matter how grubby they are. The grubbier they are the less hugs they get. There is only one way to redress hug hunger. Just do it.

Louise