Going Over Sees

I recently rediscovered a long forgotten pair of crazy pink sunglasses. Unpacking some box of excess toiletries and bobby-pins and loofahs, I spotted them. The tricky shades!

I bought them in Boston, in 1999. It's amazing that they are still intact; I think I paid five dollars for them at a kiosk outside of Faneuil Hall. They have these vibrant, gigantic magenta lenses. They are literally rose-colored glasses: when you put them on, the world is suddenly awash in shades of pink.

When first you don the glasses, the pink is shocking - overwhelming and disorienting. Gradually, though, your eyes adjust. Well, not your eyes, actually: your mind. Your mind adjusts, and within just a few minutes' time, the world looks completely normal. You have absorbed and accepted the world you see. You have assimilated. You are comfortable and perfectly content with the view. Everything seems to be just as it should be.

Then, if you remove the sunglasses -- suddenly, BLUE!

Penetrating, headache-inducing blue. The sky is sapphire, the trees' leaves cerulean and trunks deep navy. It can literally make you lightheaded, because suddenly stripped of your pink lenses, all the blue of the world is too persistent. It's loud and overpowering, and you no longer feel a part of it. It's not how you remembered it.

A few minutes pass, though, and the world adjusts and normalizes. Well, not the world, actually: your mind. Green returns to green, blue becomes less assertive, pink surfaces here and there in a flower bed or someone's lipstick. Your eyes are finally free to take a more normalized picture of the world around you, report back more accurate information.

Isn't it funny, how after a little while, your perspective can change to accept an altered or incomplete picture? And then, when suddenly thrust out of the reality you came to accept and expect, your perspective is still skewed, now in another direction.

Isn't it funny, how when you finally remove the rose-colored glasses, you can't get back to a clear view until you spend a little time sifting through the darker blues that were always there, and now demand your attention before you can move on into the full Technicolor world just teasing your peripheral vision?

Funnier still that one tough little pair of cheap pink sunglasses can be a reminder of the importance of context, time, and the incredible capacity we have to adjust... squinting a bit, perhaps, as we learn to see things differently...