I’m talking with my daughter when I notice a grimy film over her glasses. It’s so bad I can only assume a giraffe has licked them and then rolled them in the dust bunnies under the couch.
“How can you possibly see through these?” I ask.
“What?!” she protests. “They’re not THAT bad!”
I clean one lens and hold up her glasses so she can inspect the difference. Amazingly, she can’t distinguish dirty from clean. I put them on her face.
“Now I really can’t tell with them so close up.”
I am immediately reminded of what life looked like in my first year of sobriety, versus now, almost eight years in. In those early days, I didn’t yet have the time to know just how good things could get, how much clearer they’d be, how much more I’d be able to see. I thought improving to “not that bad” was the same as “really damn good.”
But with the perspective gleaned from battles won, promises kept, old knots untangled and time passed, I began to understand how sweet “good” actually is. We see that we are able to stand back–not just with distance but with wisdom, too.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes,” Proust said. Those eyes come with time, I promise. Keep going.
