We’ve been talking this month about learning from our experiences—no matter how scary or troubling. Susan had first hand experience with this while she was writing Embracing Uncertainty. Here is her account:
I was sitting at my computer when, all of a sudden, the vision through my right eye became very blurred. A rushed visit to the eye specialist revealed that a blood clot in the central vein had damaged my eye. He had no idea if it would ever heal completely…Dread is the initial feeling I had when my vision went all blurred. But in the middle of my fear and upset I kept asking myself, “I wonder what this eye problem is and what I am going to learn from it.” After a massive number of tests, the doctors couldn’t come up with anything that would physically have caused the clot in my eye. So I began looking at my life. I didn’t have to look far to come up with some reasons this eye problem might (or might not) have occurred.
Overwork? Yes. Too much intense focus on a computer screen? Yes. Stress? Yes. Paying too much attention to those things in life that aren’t really important in the grand scheme of things? Yes. Physically, something had gone wrong, but what this eye scare created was a great incentive for me to look at and evaluate my life and determine what I really wanted it to look like.
What I noticed was that my life had gone off-balance, as it tends to from time to time, and it would be wise to put it back into harmony once again. I started making necessary adjustments, and I can report that I’ve been enjoying life much more ever since. As I write this, the blurriness is still there, but it is not as bad as it was before. The pessimists say it will never get any better; the optimists say it will. But I live with the wondering, knowing that whether my eye does or doesn’t get any better, I will handle it all.
By “I’ll handle it,” I mean … “I will learn from it. I will grow from it. I will find a way to make it enrich my life.”
This means that even if I were to lose my sight, “I will learn from it. I will grow from it. I will find a way to make it enrich my life.”