Being different from most people I’m often surprised by common reactions, particularly negative ones. I have to stop and actually think about how people would look at those things if they believe their thoughts are reality. That’s why I was surprised when one of my doctors noted that their staff is often mistreated by patients.
I’m not sure whether it’s through good office management, a culture that started as a few positive employees and that evolved over time to include more people, or whether it’s just all just a fluke, but I have never been in such a positive office in my life.
The staff all act respectfully toward each other, they treat each other and the patients well, and they even announced our names with a cheerful tone. All that being case, the question then becomes; why would those people end up being mistreated by the patients? The answer is: fear.
Anger comes from fear, and people will generally be at their worst when they are the most afraid. And many of the people in that office were learning that they were either losing some, or all of their sight, and that their intervention would be somewhere between very uncomfortable and extremely painful.
Part of what was scaring people was the unknown, so they were speculating on how bad things were in the present. The second part was that they were using their imaginations to conjure a scary future. But both of those reactions are illusions. None of them necessarily accurate in that moment.
The only thing that could understandably explain any shortness, frustration or anger would be that people were in pain and had little consciousness left to consider other’s needs with. And that’s fair, and it’s why the rest of us also need to be tolerant to be wise.
The next question is: why was I generally calm and feeling fortunate? And the answer’s important, because the way I do it is how I would teach anyone else to do it too.
First off, I had read up on the eye, and the issue of the detached retina. That meant I understood more of what was happening and what people were saying. I also knew that in theory my future was more likely to be positive than negative. Knowing the truth is generally far better than believing a lot of our own self-constructed, negatively-conceived myths.
So what did I know? I’m no doctor but, in basic terms, the white ball of our eye is called the Sclera. In the middle of our Iris (the pretty, coloured part) is a dark, flexible hole called the Pupil that shrinks and expands to control how much light enters our eyeball.
Directly behind the Pupil, where the light actually hits –and attached to the back of the Sclera– is an area called the Choroid, which supplies blood to our Retina. And the Retina is the part that actually collects the light from our Pupil and results in our sight.
The Retina itself is like the pages of a book, where each page plays a slightly different role in collecting and translating the light that enters the Pupil. Some of these layers are where our ‘cones’ and ‘rods’ for colour vision are located, if you remember your Junior High / Middle School health classes.
The Retina is centred by a low spot called the Fovea, which acts as the focal point of our vision. As we move our eye around, our focus will be in the centre of our vision –wherever the Fovea and Pupil are aligned.
In a normal detached retina, we get a tiny hole in the top page of our ‘retinal book.’ This hole allows in ocular fluid which then creates a sort of blister. If light hits the far side of that blister, we see dark patches in our vision. If it hits the near side, we see light scatter across the Fovea, which can create sparkles.
If we leave those symptoms unattended (please refer to my previous post for a list of all of the potential symptoms of a detached retina), the fluid in that blister will shake around and turn the hole into a tear, which can lead to the black speckles or curtain quality to our vision.
In my case, rather than a tiny hole on the top page of my retina, I had a large U-shaped tear through all of the layers right down to the Choroid. This allowed the centre of that U-shape to fold up under itself like a carpet might.
All that meant that rather than trying to fix a tiny hole in one layer, my doctors were forced to weld that entire U-shaped canal back into place, layer by layer. The fact that they can even attach each microscopic ‘page’ to the corresponding ‘page’ is a miracle of modern medicine and surgical talent.
My doctors had a suitably serious tone and they were very forthcoming about the facts. As I noted before, it is never a good thing to have an ‘interesting’ case at the doctor’s office. That’s code for ‘rare’ which is also often more difficult. But reality is reality. It’s what our minds do with those facts that matter.
While others with much better prognoses were much more afraid (and were therefore much less pleasant to deal with), I was better off because I accepted my reality and I chose to focus on other things that were equally real.
I was in one of the leading facilities in the world with equipment that looked like it belonged on Star Trek. The staff was super-pleasant, and my doctors were considered some of the best anywhere. Even staff at the hospital for the surgery felt I was lucky to have such an excellent team on my side.
On top of all of that I was in Canada, where all of this care was going to cost me zero personal dollars. I could even be grateful for my own taxes and those paid by other Canadians who were now helping share the load of my care.
I suspect the work I had done and will have done will potentially be in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. That is genuinely a lot to be happy about, so there’s no delusion there. I was looking at what was real. It was the scared, uninformed people that were pondering illusions.
In life, we can choose to be our thinking and to have the course of our thoughts dictate the painful experiences that scare us and lead us to treat others badly. Or, we can be incited to have those thoughts, and yet not follow their course because we remain aware that they are only thoughts –while we are the thinker of them.
By seeing that reality, we can then take steps to stop the course of our mind and to redirect our thinking to other considerations that leave us feeling better. The choice is always ours, and that choice always happens in the moment we are in.
I realize I can make this sound easy here, but what people learn by working with me is that it truly is easy for everyone. People generally just get me to expose the folly of saying “But…” After that they’re just practicing the act of acceptance.
They still start off the training as all egos do. I will only take some credit for the fact that I suppose there is something about the way I answer them that allows me to be successful at what I do –but I can’t really see that, only they can. I’m just telling them the truth as I genuinely see it. Take away my accident and my subsequent meditations and I’d be just like everyone else.
If you are living in fear, I’m genuinely sorry you are. But even in the midst of that, keep in mind that there are ways to use our consciousness to make our lives better, even if we can’t materially solve every ‘problem.’
They key to all of that is acceptance, which is a good place to leave off. Because what followed next was an unlikely reaction and the most unbelievable pain I have ever experienced, and I was only kept sane by acceptance. But that is a different lesson than managing fear, and that is for the next instalment….
Until then, look closely at the people and things you love, because just being able to see them is a far bigger gift that we could ever imagine.
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
