It doesn’t seem to matter where they are when I’m not wearing them — on the side, on my head, in the bathroom cabinet. Wherever I pick them up from, and no matter how clean they were when I last put them down, my glasses are always dirty. Smudges, smears, sometimes actual bits of pollen or dust, on the inside and outside.
Sometimes, I notice, and find a bit of t-shirt with which to clean them, and other times someone else will observe the issue before I do, which seems absurd given the distance between my eye and the lens. If I can’t perceive what is going on in the tiny distance between me and my grubby glasses, what hope have I for seeing the real business of life with any real presence or awareness?
But this process of noticing what is - literally and figuratively - right in front of me is what practising mindfulness is all about. I have to clean my glasses in order to see clearly, and in much the same way, I need to build this habit of rubbing out the various, collected assumptions and biases that cloud my experience of this one precious life just as effectively as the smudge on my glasses blurs my immediate field of vision.
These narratives that I carry around, along with some hopes and fears, can stop me being open to the world around me if I am not careful, mindful.
That feeling of clarity, after a decent effort of stilling the endless chatter of my monkey mind, is akin to that which the newly poliished spectacles provide. For as long as it takes for that lens to once again gather dirt, the way ahead is clear, in focus, vital. But the grime and the noise are all around us, so life is really just a perpetual process of picking up the microfibre cloth, and sharpening up the view before us. Time after time, ad infinitum…
