One of the beautiful and exciting elements of our species, humans, is that we have a high level of ingenuity and intelligence. Through history humans are one of the few species who have developed the skill to not only use tools but also design and develop them.
As time passes, we always get better at it and develop always more amazing tools. Tools which are nowadays the backbone of the world. Tools which hint at or lead us forward to the future.
From wheels to fuels to amazingly powerful computers. To medical scientific solutions, and vaccines, extending our lives.
One of those tools, often forgotten due to its ubiquity, but omni-present and considered "critical" by most humans is the light bulb.
Because of the role light plays in our lives, and it's usefulness, light is one of the prime tools almost everyone on earth has.
When the time of the day, the time of the year, or the location we are in prevent us from benefiting daylight, the light bulb in one of its many forms allows us to still see brightly.
Light in both its natural and artificial form is an integral part of our live. Most of us couldn't imagine living without light and almost anybody has artificial lights as part of their lives too.
Besides food and shelter, many of us will consider light as the next most important "must have" to survive. Even if only to avoid constantly running into things, possibly hurting oneself. Even people living Offgrid tend to have artificial light options.
Because light helps us see better, avoid accidents, and thus increases our efficiency in most cases. Almost always.
In recent days I came to discover how important, and critical, light is in our lives. Critical beyond its ubiquitous presence in which it is often "downgraded" to a regular item on our shopping list, a switch we automatically turn on without thinking, or nowadays turns on automatically as the sun goes down or at the time that we enter our connected home.
As I write this, my relatively small home is provided by two light sources within my near vicinity. One within arm reach, the other only. Few feet away. Both smart lights and ON as they automatically switched on at the time I set months ago. Both at a rather dimmed brightness, which suits my nocturnal me rather well as I am not too big a fan of too bright.
And yet, I can barely see anything. I am currently typing this post on my phone, in full brightness mode, despite having a great AMOLED screen and dark mode activated. Normally I write my posts on my iPad Pro but after some days of constantly increasing brightness on it, today I had to activate iOS's zoom in order to be capable to read a chat in Discord. Or to read posts on Hive.
Since days I haven't been able to read anything on a white background anymore without actually forcing myself to discover what is on the screen.
My life currently happens in a 30-40% blur and faces are nothing I can recognize anymore. Images on either device I use are whether a blur or a hell of brightness to my eyes.
Some days ago I taught myself to cut my toenails "blindly". It was unexpectedly easy but I will blame the nail clipper for that. In most recent two to three days I have tried to learn to recognize when a glass is full when pouring water. Most of the time I miserably failed and while I never overflew my glass, more often than not I ended up with an only 70% full glass. At best.
It's a situation which has been degrading in last ten days, coming from perfect eyesight before. Day after day my vision has gotten worse after sleeping. In fact, yesterday I went to bed and was resigned that today I would wake and not be able anymore to read news or hive posts on my phone or iPad without resorting to the accessibility settings.
When waking this morning, it felt indeed as if doom had struck and within the shortest time I had increased the text size in iOS,as well as activated the accessibility'zoom.
Luckily the higher contrast on my phone allowed me to still be able to read Discord chats, albeit often with severe squinting and almost all of the time with brightness turned up to the max. Thankfully MIUI11 hasn't yet thrown me the 72hrs security measure challenge to type in my password manually on its default low contrast keyboard.
Tomorrow, I need to explain a friendly neighbor my new situation and ask them if they can help me with my errands. Because the local delivery app doesn't have a dark mode, navigating it has been rather impossible earlier as I wanted to order few essentials. For the first time in my life, since being a toddler, I will require assistance from a human.
I think I should spend the next few hours learning to recognize Bank notes by touch.
I don't often write about acute struggles in life and when I do, I mostly do as the struggle has (almost) been overcome. Yet, this time it feels I am facing a new challenge and one which scares me.
While having to ask a friend to help me with errands is something I can psychologically overcome, I am wondering how things will go if the acute decrease in vision continues. Right now it seems I have lost more than 80% of vision in my right eye and 20-30% in my left eye. And I almost feel incapable of doing anything.
Of course, here's hoping it is merely an infection which will soon disappear again and my vision will return to normal or close to normal, but I can not say the hope is big.
The stoic in me wonders what Epictdtus would have to say about blindness.
PS: Apologies for a second post in a row without even basic proofreading. This post was written mostly on keyboard muscle memory and trusting Swiftkey's autocorrect. It may or may not have made me look stupid but that's the era we live in and it effects almost any writer nowadays. Hopefully it's worst to happen as I intend to continue to contribute to Hive but have no plans to use dictation. Or at least no desire to use Siri.
Now I am going to pour myself another glass of water. Or two third, hopefully even three quarters of a glass.
Life, the never-ending series of challenges. One worse than the other.