Progressive progress

I could see fine until I was 18.

My distance vision began to blur my senior year of high school, and I became a glasses wearer right before I went off to college.

I switched to contacts sometime in my early twenties. My active lifestyle called for fewer objects on my head while I did radically athletic maneuvers with my young, agile body like water ski, play basketball, and field scorching grounders at third base in church league softball.

A few years after I turned 40, I began to have trouble seeing up close while wearing my contacts. Ever the pragmatist, I resorted to drugstore readers to help. When a friend at work posted a picture on social media of me in a meeting reading a report with my readers on my nose, I could not get past the utter ridiculousness of it.

If I was going to have to wear glasses with my contacts, the ever-increasing expense seemed to dictate I ditch the contacts and just wear glasses when I needed to see far away. At my annual eye exam, I went with just glasses and never looked back… so to speak.

It served me well for about 10 years. Whenever I needed to see up close, I just pulled off the glasses. When working on my computer at work, no glasses. When driving, I put on the glasses. Very easy system to navigate.

I blame the smartphone for the next phase of my descent into blindness. I found that I reverted back to a phase similar to the readers-contacts era, only now, three-fourths of the time, I had my glasses or prescription sunglasses on my forehead while I tried to see my phone.

My helpful children pointed out that I was wearing my glasses on my head more than on my nose. This revelation caused me to once again rethink my approach to corrective lenses.

I’ve never been accused of being an early adopter. It took some time to warm to the idea of switching to progressive lenses in my glasses. Back in the day, these glasses were called “bifocals” and they had a visible line across them. They were a symbol of aging.

With modern progressive lenses, the lines were gone and the wearer could more easily pass as just having regularly messed up vision rather than a complicated condition requiring multiple focal adjustment.

I wasn’t eager to adapt to progressives. I had tried progressive contacts once and nearly broke my neck stepping off a curb. It threw off my depth perception, so I cut the experiment short after one day.

Contacts adhere to the eyeball, and it was hard for me to wrap my brain around how to look out of sections of the lens. I figured that wouldn’t be as much of a problem with progressive lenses in glasses. They were outside of my eyeball, and I could theoretically move my eyeball around to find the right place in the lens to see at the right distance. So I made an eye appointment and committed to progressives.

I’m happy to report I have almost completely adjusted to this new way of seeing, just as the helpful and friendly eye technicians said I would.

“We all wear them, and we love them!” they cheerily offered. They didn’t seem to be tripping over the furniture, so I took their endorsement as evidence in favor of the move rather than an exaggerated sales technique. I’m sure the truth lies in the middle.

It was disorienting at first, and I had to overcome my habit of removing my glasses to look at my notepad in meetings or work on my computer. I even moved my glasses up to my forehead to look at my phone a few times before realizing that was no longer necessary.

My only issue now is feeling self conscious about how I look when trying to find the sweet spot to see what I need to look at. Once again my children have been super helpful. Carlton pointed out that when I bob my head around and roll my eyes trying to find the right way to look out of my glasses, I look like an old person. Carlton is so helpful.

But I’m willing to live with that in order to have the enhanced convenience of being able to keep my glasses on.

These new glasses are an apt metaphor for this stage of  life. I can only see clearly when I focus on the right places. When I’m feeling fuzzy and out of sorts, it’s because I’m focusing on the wrong things.

I may be making progress with my progressive lenses, but I’ve still got a ways to go on choosing what’s best to focus on.