Lenses

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

Most of us are wearing glasses these days, for reading at least, though some of us live with our glasses stable over our ears and nose from morning to night.

We look through the lenses in order to see more clearly the magnificence of the world around us, the trees in autumnal glory or silhouetted in ink strokes on the winter sky, or the first buds of spring and the full bloom of summer.

Yet, somehow, we see our lives as we grow older through one of two lenses, the lens of loss and diminishment or the lens of eternal youth. Through one we see only what we can no longer do. Our conversations are peppered with sentences like, “I used to be able to do that.” Or “It’s been ages since I could pick up something that heavy.”

Through the other lens we see the world in terms of the desire to stay young forever. Seeing life through this lens prompts conversation something like “Oh, I go to the gym four times a week, have private Pilates lessons and go to yoga classes every Wednesday.” There might also be whispers of a certain kind of surgery or injectables.

This binary view of ageing fogs up the lenses, making the truth difficult, if not impossible, to see. In order to see clearly the spectacle of our lives, we can adopt a view that encompasses both the recognition of our changes along with our commitment to stay as fit and well as possible.

This more inclusive understanding of life finds kinship with other beings living on planet Earth. Take lichens, for example. In decades past they were viewed as simple, binary organisms made up of fungi and algae. More contemporary science tells us that they are much more complex, home to countless bacteria that perform amazing feats of evolutionary proportion.

We too are colonised by microscopic beings which, in the right environment within us, allow us to function fully. Should they migrate to somewhere else in our body they could kill us. It seems that scientists have created a new word, holobiont, to describe an assemblage of different organisms that behave as a unit. That what lichens are and that’s what we are.

When we see through a third lens, a kaleidoscopic lens, we can hold the joyful/grieving, creative/chaotic contradictory collaboration that is human being—and human ageing. When we wipe the lens clean we see the truth of our life experience, that which enlivens and inspires alongside that which disturbs and upsets. We see the whole picture with the crystal clear, nonbinary eyes of a holobiont.