Do You Really Want to See the World Through Rose Colored Glasses?

My grandmother used to say that I always saw the world through my rose-colored glasses.  Given the fact that I've never worn glasses, I didn't really give that turn of phrase much thought... until recently.  I was wandering through yet another antique warehouse on some unnamed back road in some forgotten corner of somewhere and as is always the case when I'm relaxed and contemplating something really interesting, my mother will yell from somewhere, "Karen, come see this AMAZING rose-colored chair!".  Well, naturally you either have to go, or you will risk the entire population within a ten mile radius wishing your mother would shut up soon.  In fact, I found my mother perched on the edge of quite a lovely and unique gold velvet chair.  "So where is the rose chair?" "It's right here", she says.  You naturally look around, there is no rose chair in sight, you begin to think your mother is going mad, and so it gradually dawns on me that the chair she is sitting in is the referred-to rose chair.  "But it's a gold chair."  "No, it's a rose chair."  "Take off your glasses." My mother has a habit of never removing her sunglasses, since she was told some years ago by the doctor that she should not allow sunlight to reach her eyes in order to stave off the possibility of the dreaded cataracts that mysteriously arise with old age.  So she likes to think she is no different than Gene Simmons or Bono, but without the groupie thing.  So she obediantly takes off her sunglasses and realizes that the chair is in fact, gold.  "It's much less interesting in gold than in rose... do you think they have it in rose?" My point here is that you might think that the sunglasses in fact color everything my mother sees, and in fact you would be right.  But the thing I began to realize is that it isn't just the sunglasses.  My mother sees small animals running around her house quite frequently.  She catches sight of it as she's reading, and as she turns her head, away they go...  I pointed out to her that the animals were actually smudges on her glasses, because it never occurs to my mother that glasses ever need to be cleaned.  In fact, if she hasn't been in a shower of mud, then why would they be dirty?  Fingers, I patiently answer - yours.

How many people actually go through their day with dirty glasses?  How much does that affect our vision, having to compensate for the smudges, dirt, fingerprints, scratches, etc. that cloud that essential piece of glass?  You may know that every human being has a small blind spot in the center of our vision - it's an anatomical reality, and our vision and brain compensate for the blind spot by filling it in for us visually.  So we never realize we even have a blind spot - in fact we forget it's even there.  But how much work does that require of our visual ability?  Imagine more than the blind spot, and so not only are we perhaps not seeing the world as it is, but we may be weakening our vision every single day by all this compensatory work.

I've had numerous clients come in complaining of headaches and certain it can't be their vision because their glasses are the right prescription strength.  So of course my next question is how often do you clean them?  Unless someone has OCD, it's fairly rare.  So how much are we really straining our vision to compensate for just sheer laziness?

I did buy the gold chair... now that I have it home, I realized that I have a pink lightbulb in the light that sits next to it.  It really isn't half bad as a rose-colored chair.