Preface: A Singular Sensation

Preface:

A Singular Sensation

 

Each day I live in a glass room

Unless I break through it with the thrusting

Of my senses and pass through

The splintered walls to the great landscape.

— Mervyn Peake

When I turned 60, an unexpected event occurred that inspired me to write this book. Since the age of 10, I had worn contact lenses to correct for my extreme nearsightedness. But in the last few years, that solution had begun to work less well. After turning 56, I found myself wearing reading glasses a good bit of the time to do my work. I developed glaucoma about the same time and had to use eye drops that left my eyes sore, swollen, and dry. Contact lens wearing became increasingly difficult. By the evening, I would just take out my lenses and read without glasses or contact lenses by pressing the book up against my nose. I was heading back to where I was at age 9 before anyone knew I couldn’t see very well.

When I was 59, I remembered that my mother had promised me as an 11-year-old that someday I wouldn’t have to use anything to correct my vision. I thought I might have glimpsed the fulfillment of her promise a few days later while watching Tiger Woods play golf at a local tournament. The great golfer had had laser surgery to correct his vision a few years earlier. I was impressed to see him staring steely-eyed at the flags while strong winds blinded me with dirt that interfered with my contact lenses.

At my next eye appointment, I asked my delightful ophthalmologist, Dr. Miriam Dougherty, if someone with glaucoma could have laser surgery for vision correction. She said sure and recommended I see one of the top laser surgeons in the country, Dr. Peter Rapoza. I was pleased to hear the news and even happier when Dr. Rapoza’s assistant informed me that the first visit was free to check to see if I was a good candidate for the surgery.

Dr. Rapoza turned out to be a tall, distinguished-looking man who somewhat resembled the actor George Clooney. He obviously liked people and did everything he could to be kind and helpful. You feel comfortable in his presence no matter what he has to tell you. Peter had good news and bad news for me. I could certainly use the laser surgery to improve my vision, but I also had cataracts that were so bad they should be immediately removed. He recommended that I have cataract surgery and later follow up with laser surgery if anything wasn’t visually perfect after the cataracts were gone. He explained that during cataract surgery a new lens is implanted in each eye that corrects distance vision and many people find that solution avoids the need for laser corrections.

I subsequently had both eyes operated on and unexpectedly ended up with the best vision of my life. I could now see 20/20 (or average) at a distance. My near vision improved so much that for most close-up tasks I could see better without reading glasses than with them. It was like being physically reborn in a way … except with improvements. With cataracts everything is dark and yellow. After the surgeries I could see that snow was still white, whereas before the surgeries I had been very concerned about the way pollution had made snow so yellow! In addition, night lights previously blurred everything into a big amorphous halo. Now I could see unlit objects quite clearly with only starlight to help me.

I woke up every day to see everything around me perfectly. That had never happened before in my life.

This astonishing personal experience taught me that progress can occur faster than even optimists realize. In my lifetime, technology improvements had taken me from being a virtually blind person to someone who has almost flawless vision at age 60 without any personal effort.

Let me talk about optimism for a moment. Researchers have observed that optimists often accomplish more than realists and pessimists. Why? Optimists try more things and stick to them longer. The realist or pessimist may stop short of trying or trying again, just at the brink of success. But it’s not enough just to be an optimist. You need to do something based on your optimism. Optimists who never do anything except expect the best results are often referred to as day dreamers. Extreme optimists who think about what’s maybe over the rainbow are often dismissed as crackpots, or worse.

I’m a different kind of optimist: an intensely practical one. I want to see results … and soon. I’m impatient. I do everything fast and wish I could go faster: There is so much that needs to be done that most people ignore. That’s one reason I was so impressed by my experience with cataract surgery; here was practical progress that helped me a lot and happened on its own. Wouldn’t it be great if great improvements in all kinds of areas I care about occurred without my effort? That’s a goal that I’ve been working on for some time. Optimistically, I realized that if I could explain more about how this could become routine you and I would each become beneficiaries of many more improvements without any effort of our own, more people would be inspired and directed to take the actions necessary to create rapid improvements. 

Inspired by this amazing vision improvement, I decided it was time to provide a progress report on the 400 Year Project that I began in September 1995 to demonstrate how the world can make four centuries worth of normal improvements from 2015 to 2035. Adventures of an Optimist is that report and more. 

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.