The Sin of Sight
What began as a simple observation of the self unfurled itself to reveal a more encompassing web of my own personal values. The observation: When I want to speak fluently and express something from the heart, I close my eyes. I asked myself why I do that; to drown out distractions, to drown out judgments.
This led to a whimsical question - “If you had to lose one of the special senses, which one would it be?”
As attached and reliant I am on eyesight, I would choose that. I love art, I love pictures, I am in awe of all the images the world has to offer, but I believe that our eyesight has limited us from experiencing the world around us, especially experiencing people. We judge too quickly with our eyes. When we see a person, immediately, we make a thousand subconscious notes. Tall or short, skinny or fat, attractive or not, all these things just serve to blind us from what the individual has to truly offer. These visual cues represent nothing of what the person thinks, how the person feels, no indication of what treasures lay in the mind. In the end, we make our friends based on who they are, not on how they look. I hope so, at least.
Sight is blinding.
When we meet someone, the first contact we make is when we look at each other, truly the first impression. Now in our hypothetical experiment, remove that. What would be our first contact? It would be what we say. We would think about what they say, why they are saying it. Right off the bat, we connected on a deep level, one psyche to another. There’s no chance of prejudgments. Isn’t that beautiful?
I wonder how many bigots are actually blind, because I would find it hard to be a racist when one doesn’t know what race they are. Is that even a question that the blind worry about? How important is the concept of skin color to the blind? I would assume that the blind only care about what the person has to say, and skin color is pretty low on the totem pole.
How much more profound a species humans would be if we were blind. The words of our soul would flow so freely, unchecked by preconceived notions of the receiver. Images replaced by expressions of thought. What a wonderful world.
This might just be a highly romanticized abstraction of the world, but isn’t it poignant to consider that a world without eyesight is a world full of insight?
