Doctor, My Eyes

EGOTISM. The number one reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try. I can’t see you because I’m all about myself. Let me tell you my opinion. Let me entertain you with this story about myself. Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view. They are simply not curious about other people.

blindness doesn’t feel at all like the death of the sighted person that Father Carroll insisted it was. Rather, it feels like a cultivation of what the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki called “beginner’s mind.” I may be a middle-aged man with a master’s degree, but I’m still going to have to take a deep breath in, let it out, and try one more time to fin

He could only handle life if he looked at it carefully from the corner of his eye.

I’d been living with a kind of visual death sentence hanging over me, one that yesterday a young ophthalmological fellow had casually commuted.

How much of life have I missed, he wondered, simply by failing to look? Or by looking and not seeing?

If the mind is preoccupied, the open eyes have no orientation. There’s no one at the steering wheel! This disconnection of mind and eyes can happen many times during a day with no lasting effect if there is reconnection. However, if there is a habit of constantly day-dreaming, fantasizing, worrying or ruminating about problems, the eyes will become