Impaired Vision

I'm pretty sure I've written about this before, but it's been awhile and the story came up again, so I thought I'd restate it. Basically, we see what we believe until otherwise. This falls into the realm of "what you don't know you don't know" or swadhyaya, self study. It's relevant today because I'm at CHEO at the eating disorders program and one of the things that happens for these guys is that what they see with their eyes isn't what other people see. Some people with disordered eating see themselves as overweight when others don't see that. In fact, there's an ad running in the newspaper that tries to demonstrate that phenomenon by showing a larger girl in the reflection of the mirror of a smaller girl.

Anyways, a long time ago I bought my first car. It was a Honda CR-X and I loved my car. I saw it for sale in a parking lot in Kingston, New York, and I knew it was my car. It was already a few years old when I bought it. It turns out it was my neighbours selling the car, so I felt confident it was a great car because I knew them and I thought they'd be telling the truth about the car even though they weren't the original owners and I just had a good feeling about it. There was only one thing I wished were different about that car and that was I wished it had a sunroof. The people who owned it before told me the sunroof was never installed. It had a cut out place for the sunroof in between the 2 seats. It was a 2-seater car. I loved it.

I used to drive it and pray that I didn't hit anything (I did finally hit a deer on I-81 on my way up to visit my family in Ottawa and that killed the car - I was extrememly lucky as the county coroner told me - he was the first to reach me on the side of the road after the accident) and I had that car for ages it seems. It just used to bug me a little bit that it didn't have a sunroof and I even imagined taking it to the dealer to get the sunroof installed.

One day my sister was visiting - I lived at Omega and we were parked right in front of what used to be called "The Big House," which was where my summer digs were and is now Skip's office amongst other things. Anyways, we were sitting in the car getting ready to go somewhere and she was checking things out in the car and she said, "what's this button for?" I didn't know but we had the car running so I told her she could push it. Well wouldn't you know it, but that button opened the sun roof.

I had another 6 or 8 months in that car before the deer incident. I used to laugh my head off about how blinded I had been by my beliefs. I believed that I didn't have a sun roof so much that it affected my eyesight. I didn't even see the button on the dashboard.