Anne Giles Clelland

I Can See

The mother died, I had a retinal hemorrhage, the grandmother died, the opthamologist said the retinal hemorrhage could be the start of macular degeneration. 

If the retina had cracked like an old tire because I was near-sighted, the leaking blood would stop, then reabsorb.  If a blood vessel bulged through the crack because I had eye disease, well, then I would starting gettings shots in the eye.

We would have to wait and see.

Much in the last five years of my life have called me to ask "What's it all about, Alfie?" 

The threat of losing my eyesight - that one scared me.  I tried to be matter-of-fact:  If I only have a short time left with my eyesight, what do I want to have seen before it's gone?

My answer was immediate:  I have already seen everything I need to.  I would be sad go blind, but I have seen what I needed to see.

I had many hours to imagine myself in my mother's and grandmother's places as they lay in their beds dying. They had regrets. I wish for fewer.

What do I want to have done with my vision before the lights go out?  Asking myself that question produced a surprising and sad answer.  I knew immediately what I most want to have done by the time I'm in my deathbed and can do no more, or before I lose my sight.  It calls as my deepest longing.  I have not listened.  

I have new time.  I learned Friday that my eyeball sprang a leak because it's been spinning half a century.  That's it.  Could happen again, will heal again.  Not going to lose my eyesight.  Not going to lose that longing, either.  I have begun.

Top Ten Sights I Have Seen in My Beautiful Little Life

(1) My sister's baby born

The list could start and end there.

(2) Alex Edelman playing the piano

Photo:  Piotr Edelman

(3) Alisha Jones Edwards performing in a play

(4) Gargoyle at the very top of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris

(5) Botticelli's Birth of Venus in Florence

(6) Michelangelo's David in Florence

(7) Black, wet, pointed, leafless tree limbs against a gray winter sky in Blacksburg, Virginia

(8) Virginia Woolf's handwritten manuscript for Mrs. Dalloway at the British Library

(9) The Gem Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution

(10) My cat, my cat, my cat, anytime, anywhere, never, ever again

This Graph Thing

Several days after making a timeline of the last five years of my life, I extended it in a communiqué to myself to include my entire life.  I have had some very challenging times, especially in the last five years.  The occurrence of most of the excruciating points on the timeline were beyond my control and most people would have found them painful.  I found them devastating, however, traumatizing even, some of them almost annihilating. 

I respect the enormity of what happened to me, but I know objectively and rationally that worse could have happened and with greater frequency.  I have experienced only some of what the human condition can be.  That fact is of no comfort to me.  "It could have been worse" is one of the most patronizing, shaming statements one person can make to another. So I don't minimize the extent of my feelings about my life.  I wonder about them.  I am sorry about my on-going sorrow.  I wonder if I suffer unduly and what I might do about that.

Here's a whiteboard drawing of how I am visualizing ranges of feeling over time using three graphs.

In the top graph excerpted below, the dotted line represents to me what I would term a normal human range of a variety of human feelings, experienced as highs, mediums and lows, sometimes from internal and conscious and unconscious causes, sometimes in reponse to external events.  This, to me, represents a sound response to, and handling of, the human condition. 

I have described myself as living acutely.  What I perceive is my own range of feelings is represented with the green line, sometimes in the normal range, sometimes outside of it, with higher highs and lower lows.  The red scale on the left is my attempt to show that I think my range of feelings sits below that of the normal range.  The lows are deeper and, therefore, take more time and effort to scale to reach a medium point or a high one. When I look at my personal timeline of my first fifty-three years on the planet, I spent a lot of it sad.

My father defines "optimization" in a way I find meaningful: "Maximize, minimize or stabilize, within constraints."

Based on my temperament, genetics, life experience, even preferences, I don't expect the amplitude of my range of feelings to change much.  I will probably continue to live my green line of acuteness.  That's a constraint.  But I want to optimize my range of feelings.  I want to shift it up a tad so that my acuteness has highs and lows along that normal line, not below it.

I was born on December 30th so I'm always just hours older than the year.  I know that time is a human construct, that marking birthdays and the beginnings of new years is, at best, conventional and, at worst, arbitrary.  Whatever.  I feel inspired during this early start to what will be my 54th year of life on the next December 30th, and in these early days of a new year, to identify what interferes most profoundly with the quality of my life, especially in terms of my relationship with myself and others. 

It's this graph thing. 

When I study my timelines, seeking what caused the next point to be a bit higher, to be the beginning of what would become the way up from one of those lows, it was one thing and one thing only:  awareness.  I can only change of what I am aware.

About this graph thing, then, I've got this awareness thing started.