While reading a book on wisdom this morning, I came across the expression “seeing with fresh eyes”. As sometimes happens, my brain at first processed the written words incorrectly; I substituted the word fresh with fish, misinterpreting the expression. Fortunately, it didn’t take too long for me to recognize the mistake. After a double take and a more careful rereading of the sentence, I laughed and wondered if I shouldn’t call the optometrist’s office for an exam (like the reminder card that I’d recently received in the mail had suggested).
That’s when it struck me: my subconscious could be on to something. There may be something useful to see the world as a fish does.
Anatomically, fish eyes are not too different from land vertebrates. In fact, the basic structure is the same. There is a cornea, pupil, lens, and retina. There are rods and cones, enabling perception of light and color. However, one key difference separates fish eyes from ours, a distinction that makes us view fish consciousness as vastly different than ours. Except for sharks, fish don’t have eyelids. They can’t blink.
That’s why fish stare.
Staring is not necessarily a habit that I would like to acquire. Two weeks ago, I was having lunch with my family on the patio of a Greek restaurant when I heard a woman sit at the table next to us and tell the server that she felt. “I think I need some fluids and sugar,” she said. Trying to be casual, I turned my head to find a young woman in her twenties who was flushed in her cheeks and neck. She had the look of someone who was teetering on the edge of syncope.
“Dad”, my oldest daughter whispered, “you’re staring.”
As a healthcare professional with decades of medical experience, I admit that I feel entitled to a visual inspection of someone who publicly declares feeling ill. Apparently, the intensity of the optical assessment associated with that entitlement is not for the faint of heart.
My daughter had not heard the woman’s complaint of feeling ill. “Still,” she said, after I quietly explained what was going on, “that was kind of a creepy look.”
It was a clinical look, I wanted to explain, a look that blocks out everything and everyone else around and focuses on one person at one time, in this case a person with a verbal complaint that could be harbinger of heat exhaustion or, even worse, heat stroke. My eyes swiveled back to the young woman. She was alone. This could be my daughter, I thought. This was a young person traveling by herself and in need of help. This was someone else’s daughter who needed someone else on the planet to pay attention to her, right now, right this instant.
“You’re doing it again,” I heard a family member say.
“Try this,” the server announced, placing what looked like a rapidly whipped concoction of ice, juice, and yoghurt in front of the young woman. “The sun is very hot.” The woman grabbed it and began drinking.
Treatment in place, I tried to watch surreptitiously as the girl sipped and sighed her way through the cold drink, her color improving with each inhale through the straw. When the glass was empty, the red blotching was also gone from her face and neck. She was not going to require an active intervention from a stranger at the next table.
“You were looking pretty overheated,” I said in a voice loud enough for her to hear.
The young woman turned and smiled. “I probably shouldn’t have done that hike in the midday sun,” she admitted. “But I do feel better now. Thank you.”
Our tables had a brief conversation during which we learned where the young woman was from, where she had been, and where she was going. It was very polite and cordial. Shortly thereafter, she left, waving as she did. There was no further staring.
Look, fish eyes aren’t usually appropriate, I grant you. If a big carp came to the edge of an aquarium tank and just watched me, I would definitely think something strange was happening and would probably move away. So I’m glad that humans can blink, pleased that we can turn our view in an assortment of directions so that we don’t so easily invade the space of lifeforms around us.
But sometimes the world needs to be seen with fish eyes. Sometimes we do need to stare. Not mindlessly. Just purposefully. With intention. With a focus that permits pattern recognition and potential engagement and action. With an intensity that lets each other know that we aren’t separate and disconnected.
Decades ago, I was driving home from work one evening when, driving through a construction zone, the four cars in front of me had a pile up. While there were some obvious injuries, none seemed life-threatening. As I was running back to my car to get some supplies, an elderly woman asked me to check on her husband. It didn’t seem necessary. A guy of about eighty, he was sitting in the passenger seat of the van, talking. The van had minimal damage. He was even moving his arms and had no cuts or bruising. “I can’t feel my arms,” he said, after I climbed into the van and asked what was bothering him. Seconds later, the guy stopped breathing. I remember focusing on him with an intensity that sears memories. This must be a spinal cord injury, from rapid flexion and extension of his neck. The guy needed traction on his neck, immediately. In order to do that, he needed to be out of the van and on the ground.
The fellow was huge; his tiny wife wasn’t going to be able to help me move him. She was chattering about where they were heading and how they had recently been married. That’s when, through the front windshield, I saw a construction worker standing at least a hundred feet down the road, talking to someone from another vehicle. My hands were busy, trying to stretch the elderly man’s head in the van’s passenger seat away from his shoulders. So I shot a fish-eyed stare through the van windshield as if it was some sort of communication device. The look was instinct. It was meant to send a beam of energy across space that would get the construction worker’s attention. Amazingly, it did. He turned, squinted, and saw me. Somehow he interpreted the movement of my head as a gesture to get himself over to the van as fast as his feet could carry him. Together, we lowered the large, unresponsive newlywed to the hard highway pavement. I then pulled the poor fellow’s head away from his body, hoping that the traction would relieve pressure on his spinal cord. He started breathing again. And he kept on breathing, all the way through the helicopter ride to the hospital, through surgery, and, I later heard, through his discharge home after hospitalization.
Yep, fish eyes can be freaky. Like so much of life, however, they do have their place and time.
Sometimes we need to live without blinking.