I got glasses. Not sunglasses , not cool shades to wear on a boat or a deck with friends in shorts and gym shoes. Actual glasses – ones that make the fuzzy world sharper again, make us look and feel older, and ones that allow me to read books again with ease. I did not want glasses, but I needed them.
Even though I had noticed a slow deterioration of my eyesight during the years prior, I never had glasses or contacts my entire life and throughout the past year, when I started staring at monitors 8+ hrs per day.
We all struggled over the past year in more ways than one, but the part that was most discouraging for me personally was the increasing lack of sharpness in my eyesight up close and over time also at computer distances. Finally, and being fully vaccinated, there was no escape – I signed up with one of the local eye doctors and got glasses. They work like magic.
With this experience, I have been thinking a lot about getting better vision, and primarily from two perspectives – about getting old, and correcting a perspective that got out of whack.
With the death of my good parents and so many friends and mentors especially during the past year, I have been becoming more aware that I am getting older. More people ask me for my opinion now then when I was young. As a result of this, I have been thinking a lot about the important difference between having experiences and having wisdom.
Being older, we have seen more situations, we have experienced more leaders – good and bad ones, and we have observed ideas of all quality levels show back up after 10+ years, pushed by people who are not aware of their sorry history. We have read more books and listened to speeches – both trivial and profound ones. We so often sit in meetings and notice that have more experience than most in the room! But, do we have wisdom?
Wisdom is not the sum of our experiences, but the ability to see within these experiences principles and values of broader applicability and potential to improve the human condition. It takes much work to gain wisdom from experiences – deep reflection, and thoughtful and iterative analyses of self and others.
Instead, as we get older, we risk looking at the world in ways that are decreasingly flexible like the lenses in my eyes. We are sure we know! We may blend out entire spaces or only look at them with such prejudice that learning cannot occur at all. We do not feel comfortable facing questions anymore, questions that broaden our field of vision. Instead, we look at ever less with ever more certainty. And we do not notice that we may have experiences but lack wisdom.
So, as I get used to my new glasses, I also want to broaden my field of view and be open to new perspectives. I want to read more, listen to podcasts, meet different people, and learn from them. In doing this, I try to not just get older and more experienced, but to further gain wisdom that affect positivity those I encounter each day and others, too.
I like my new glasses because they remind me to keep a close eye on my perspective!