Life is busy, not just for me, but for everyone in the world it seems. Yesterday, I flew out of the office, still on the phone and punching emails out while I was in the cab. I needed to go and have my eyes checked. Like everything about me, my eyes have a quirk, one of them has never learnt to see properly and the other one sees so perfectly that “my affliction” was only picked up when I went for my learners licence when I was 17 years old. By then my brain had learnt how to see my way and apparently could not be changed. More recently, I have just acquired an added difficulty, in that my arms have become too short and I need glasses to read. So a complex check needs to take place to make sure I protect my vision as I toddle off into my middle years.

I arrived at the Eye Specialist and walked into reception, I duly filled in the forms and was told to go into a room next door to wait my turn. I wandered into the room and it was filled with people. I felt mildly irritated as I thought, “this is going to take long.” Then I noticed something different. It is not often that I am the youngest person in the room these days, but I was the youngest by far. There were about ten people in the room and they were all about 80. The room was quiet, but for a man who I later learned was 89, who was holding court in a sonorous English accent. He was an actor and he was speaking about his wife, whom he had lost 15 years ago when she was 64. She had been a well known actor in the TV soapie Neighbours. He was telling stories about their life in the theatre. His rheumy eyes were filled with nostalgia as he regaled how much he loved her and how while he still missed her, he spoke to her all the time and knew she was with him. As each person got up to be seen to and left the room, he shuffled up and took the vacated seat next to someone else and asked “Would you like to see her picture? She was beautiful.” People obliged and stories continued. It struck me how lovely being old really is, in some ways. You are allowed to do and say more or you have got to the point where you don’t care what people think. Just like very young children, the older people in our society, seem less inhibited and as a result the waiting room became a chatty, convivial place, rather than one where we were all paging through our magazines, silently harrumphing that it was taking too long to be seen to.

Part of my procedure meant that I had to have drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils so that the doctor could look into the back of my eyes to check that everything was functioning well. This meant a check first and then another wait in another room while the drops took effect. Once again, the actor and I were back in the same room. This time I heard stories of him being a navigator for the pilots in the war. He was really inspiring. Again we went our separate ways.

The drops meant that my vision would be affected for about two hours, so my daughter came to pick me up, as I could not drive myself home. I had told her to just come in when she got there and wait in reception. As I came out of my last check, she was alone sitting next to the actor, and they were chatting away happily, her face glowing as she grinned at me (my distance vision was fine, but everything close up was a blur). I paid and she said her goodbyes. As we walked out she said “Mum, I loved that man, he told me how he had just met his great grandchild and that she had been named after a baby who, his daughter had lost many years ago to a cot death and the family wanted to keep the name going and recognise and remember that baby, who was no longer with them.” It struck me then how everybody who had chatted to him had been changed by the experience, we chatted about him for a long time, he made us speak of love, of courage, bravery and loss. It was so much better than crazily flipping through a magazine. We should all take a leaf out of old people and tiny kiddies books, we are spiritual beings having a human experience and our aim is connection. It is how we grow. Finding the courage and time to connect needs to be conscious if we want to bring texture to our lives, rather than life being a boring waiting room!

© Tanya @ Ordinary Poetry

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