Fortune Is Relative
Vision Impairment is complex and nuanced. There is more to this than just the degree of functional impairment.
I am so glad that I have slowly gone blind. Less ambiguously, I am so glad that I have gone blind slowly. News of a complete stranger's sudden and traumatic blindness has made me ponder the differing ways we lose our sight.
Blindness comes about in different ways; some are born blind, some acquire blindness and some have blindness thrust upon 'em (with thanks to the bard for the apposite language).
I am in the acquiring blindness category, doing so extremely slowly over a span of 60 years. But I have known people who were born blind and also known people who have literally lost all their sight in a single traumatic episode. Although the destination is superficially the same, the actual journey to that unlit destination is very consequential. In contrast to someone born blind, I do have an experiential understanding of colour, shading and visual composition. If I had been blind from birth, then my understanding of colour would necessarily be vicarious, and personally I cannot conceive that such a second hand understanding would give me the same deep and intrinsic internal representation.
I am as sure as I can be that my dreams are not monochromatic, and I'm fairly sure that at least some of the colours in my dreams approximate to the colours in the physical world. Oranges are orange, the sky is sky blue and fire engines are, well, fire engine red. One of my most abiding visual memories is the vertiginous vista from Striding Edge approaching the summit of Helvellyn. The exact topology may have become muddled as I've aged, but that image from 50 years ago remains one of the most breathtakingly beautiful and inspiring things I will take to my grave.
I am immensely grateful for the limited sight I once possessed – it has given me tremendous context, experiential depth and innumerable memories. So surely, if I'm going to be completely blind at 60, the least bad option must be to have perfect sight until that point. But having perfect sight for all my life, only to have it completely and instantly snatched away feels like a trauma almost too hard to bear. This is not a scientific conclusion, but amongst the blind people I do know, rapid deterioration of sight does correlate with feelings of helplessness in the face of unreasonable fate, often leading to depression or anger.
In contrast, I've spent 60 years as an apprentice and a journeyman in The Right Worshipful Company of Canesmiths and Dogwranglers. I've learned my trade through 10,000 hours (well, actually, 600,000 hours) of practice, starting with the easy stuff (not reading road signs, never making eye contact or not playing tennis), through the journeyman challenges of falling down steps and mistakenly visiting the wrong single sex facilities, all the way to today's master craftsman status as a determined, albeit sometimes inept, voyager in this intrinsically visual world.
To the vision impaired readers of this blog, I'm very conscious that your experiences and perspectives will be different and equally valid. This post only interrogates my own sense of good fortune.
And to all readers, sighted or not, there are many, many other reasons I feel content with my lot, but this post hopefully highlights just one nuance of vision impairment. Sight loss covers a broad spectrum from moderate to total. The context of the loss is extremely important. And there are often compounding factors that turn a manageable challenge into an enormous mountain.
With all this complexity, offering assistance may feel like a recipe for offending rather than helping. Of course, don't pre-judge what someone needs or where they're going, but if you do openly offer help it will almost always be welcomed or politely declined. For myself I'll gladly take your arm as a friend, bemoan the price of beer and the state of the roads, or exchange views on today's utterly unfathomable geopolitics. That'll usually idle away the journey to our destination, and give me yet another reason to be cheerful about the sheer abundance of individual human kindness.
Is there a takeaway from this rather introspective post? For me it's clear. I feel very fortunate that I lost my sight gradually, and I celebrate all the other upsides in my life. And for anyone with the time and means to read this post, it's worth remembering that however shitty things might feel, there are undoubtedly many others amongst the 8 billion inhabitants of this planet considerably worse off - fortune is always relative.