lenses

I have horrible eyes.

I am not exaggerating. They are bad.
Think yours are worse? I will just scoff at you.
Psh!
I am thankful to be able to see at all.
Truly.

I got my first pair of glasses when I was in second grade.
They were brown and big and definitely not cute.

(Infinitely grateful for the inventor of contact lenses, by the way…)

I have had my share of bad glasses in my day.

Middle School years were not kind to me either.

Especially since I was going through them in the tail end of the big bangs and the horrible perms fad.
Somehow I was under the illusion that if something was trendy, it actually looked good.
Um. It didn’t.
Add glasses and braces, and imagine me on one of those ‘awkward family photos’ cards you see in Target. That picture in your head right now. That was me…

Anyways…

Whenever I would go to the eye doctor to get a new prescription, I would put on the new glasses.
There was always this sense of brightness and a period of adjustment.
At first, the new lenses seemed like they were too much.

I wanted to go back to my old glasses because they were comfortable.
But they were not what was best.

I had to get used to seeing the world through the new lenses.

We all have our own lenses we use to see the world around us.
Our view of things is shaded and shaped by our own experiences, whether we want it to be or not.
And each life experience gives us a different perspective, our own unique view of things.

That one simple truth has been a source of a lot of unnecessary conflict in my own life and relationships.
When I only see my own view of things, painted by my own personal perspective, I am missing a lot.

We are all different and can see the exact same event through many totally different lenses.

If you are to stop just for a minute and think about the fact that someone else can have a very different lens they are looking through,
Try to catch a glimpse through their lens.

Be empathetic.
You will never be able to truly see their exact perspective because you have not lived their life,
But I urge you to try.