I am spending this week with my parents while my mother has cataract surgery. She’ll need it for both eyes eventually, but today they are beginning with her left eye. Seeing things clearly has been difficult for her for a while. Puzzles are harder. Reading takes much longer. Deciphering road signs is impossible. We are hopeful that the procedure will help her sight improve, and a few days of discomfort will be worth it.
It’s gotten me thinking about sight.
- How grateful for it I am.
- How it’s not a given.
- How corrective lenses are one of the greatest inventions ever.
- How even when two people look at the same object or event they see different things about it.
- How the way we see the world is at once individual and communal—highly influenced by the culture and media we consume, and lately this is terrifying to me.
- How seeing, hearing, or creating something beautiful just may be the answer to what is terrifying in the world.
- How when I get stuck in my writing, I’m learning to take a breath, and then just write what I see.
In her book on writing, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott reflects on E. L. Doctorow’s quote: “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
She says: “You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.”
a writing prompt
What is in front of you? What can you see, right where you are?
Start by describing the objects and space around you, then see (see!) where your words take you next.
