Priory Secretarial Services

When I was about six years old, my eyesight began to fail in a hail of migraines. My parents, one perfectly sighted and the other myopic, took me to the optician and I received my first pair of spectacles. To this day I am grateful for the little-celebrated technology of optics which allow me to function as if I am fully sighted.

Skip this paragraph if you are squeamish. One thing with myopia is that you tend to get ‘floaters’ across your sight, little strands that appear as either transparent or black and come and go. Last weekend, I experienced something new: flashing lights and the appearance of a larger than usual blot on my vision. As myopia also makes you more susceptible to torn retinas, I rushed to get it checked out. Fortunately, it was not that serious, but a result of the jelly in my eye separating from the retina and leaving a blob behind causing a permanent floater in the upper outside corner of my vision of my right eye.

I have named the new flaw in my eyesight Bertie and he has a little train of black dots like Japanese soot sprites, susuwatara or Makkuro kurosuke, as seen in two of my favourite Ghibli Films, “My Neighbour Totoro” and “Spirited Away”. If you met me you would not notice anything, but as I looked at you, I would see Bertie hovering somewhere around your left shoulder. I took the above photo yesterday. You will see a beautiful sunny scene, but I had Bertie in my vision of it, gazing at it with me. My new invisible but not imaginary friend, with his little following of susuwatara.

When I was growing up, many of my friends could not imagine what it was like to be so short-sighted. They would ask me to take off my glasses, hold up their hand asking me, “How many fingers?” I would respond with the right number, adding, “but they are very blurred.” 

It is rarely possible to enter fully into another person’s experience. Even if they are enjoying or suffering something we, too, have known, their feelings will not be exactly what ours were. But this is no excuse for either carrying your burdens alone or dismissing the concerns of others as unimportant. It is why we need to find our tribes for the various areas of our life or concerns we share, and why we also need to be open to connecting with those we would not see as our own type of people. In finding our tribes we exercise sympathy, and in being curious about the experiences of those who are different from ourselves, we learn empathy. At the heart of both is going beyond our comfort zones to connect with others. This is one of the joys of networking that makes it worth walking into a room of strangers, whether virtual or IRL.

Let’s all go out there, and listen to each other’s stories. You never know what friends you will find, or what strangers you’ll meet whose enriching touch on your life will remain long after their faces fade. These are the many people you will carry with you who may not be visible, but are not imaginary either. And you will be part of someone else’s invisible retinue. Don’t you just love the interconnectedness of things?