A Point of Reference

I just finished a unit in my Psychology classes about biology. One of the things we talked about was the eyes and how they worked and play a major part in perception. The weird thing about vision is you can’t really tell that it’s getting worse. It’s not one of those things where you wake up and it’s suddenly completely terrible compared to the day before. For me, it took a teacher saying, “You realize you squint to the see the board?” for me to go get an eye exam and discover that world was not as blurry as I was perceiving it to be. It was a gradual failure that without a little help, I might have not have noticed for some time and continued to struggle to see without even realizing it. The trick is, there really isn’t a point of reference with your eyes. There isn’t that big jump where you can tell that day A was different from day B. It changes, that’s for sure, but you don’t get to tell.

Last night I was watching this movie called The Ice Harvest. I had seen it in the theaters back in 2005 and remembered getting a pretty good laugh at it so I popped it in when I got home last night. I get about 80% of the way through the movie when I realize I hadn’t laughed. At all. I start thinking back and wondering if maybe I made a mistake about which movie it was but I’m sure I didn’t. I know I laughed a lot the first time I watched it… this time it just wasn’t funny. It suddenly became a point of reference. It would seem my sense of humor changed a fair amount between 23 and 28. I found myself wondering what else had changed. Is there some other point of reference I could look to and figure out who I was back then? What’s different between then and now? Is my perception at all clearer than it was back then? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way though. You don’t get to manifest epiphany. You get it through some combination of readiness, willingness and well… dumb luck. It wouldn’t be an epiphany it came any other way, now would it?