Seeing Spots

A spot of brown pigment the size of a small kernel of corn sits in the white of my eye. I take myself to an eye doctor, who examines it and says, "Come back in four months." I begin to obsess on it. Figuratively, it limits my vision. Obsessing on a spot is like proofreading, and I'm a genius at it. Detail-oriented is an understatement.

This is not the first spot I've obsessed on. There was the premature skin cancer on my temple. The mysterious mole on my palm. The dark spot on the sole of Adele's foot. The white spot on my mammogram.

Each one has stopped me cold for weeks. In each instance, my life has suddenly become small, like a rain poncho that folds up into its own tiny sack. The spot becomes all that I am.

How are you?

I am a spot, thank you.

For a time, I live inside its small circle, confined by fear.

How can I push through the anxious thoughts and view this as a circle to look through, a lens on my life? If I look through it, what can I see? The future is unclear, unknown. What will I do when my fast-growing girls leave home? Teach? Write? What will life be like without the anchor and structure of raising them? How will I face my own aging and my parents' inevitable passing?

I want my girls to go forth in the world strong and resilient, and I try to prepare them for all that lies ahead. It's an impossible task. Even without major trauma or illness, our lives will unfold into new shapes entirely, and I wonder whether we'll be able to absorb and adapt to the changes. It's scary to look through this lens--maybe easier to stay focused on the spot itself.

Using a cognitive behavioral strategy to curb my anxiety, I ask the eye doctor, "What is the realistic probability that this spot will turn out to be a problem?"

He hesitates, looking serious. "Twenty percent," he answers.

My strategy backfires. Twenty percent feels like a big number. The remaining eighty percent is for the moment blotted out by anxiety, eclipsed.

On the girls' spring break, we visit with friends, staying for two days at a hotel with a special water feature--a pool with a current, in the shape of a circular river. Guests float around and around the water track in clear vinyl, doughnut-shaped innertubes. My old college friend and I get in, jostled by other vacationers. If viewed from above, we would look silly, crowded creatures bumping into each other, drifting in circles. Why do we do this? Does it soothe our souls to travel in circles, passing by the same reference points over and over, without need of volition?

From my innertube, I ask my friend what she thinks about my obsessing on the spot in my eye. "How do I break out of it? Is this normal?"

She consoles me as we float along together. "It sounds perfectly natural." Any new spot, she suggests, is a subtle reminder of our mortality. "Aging, mortality--they're hard to accept."

I relax in the sun with her words, perfectly natural.

Back at home, I want it gone. I'm mad. Out, vile jelly! I tell my eye.

Then again, I'm attached to it, to its sharpness of vision.

I want to shake out the little sack that is this spot so that my life opens up again and is expansive--a warm, infinitely wide bed sheet from the dryer, floating down to where I can smooth out its flowers and curl up on it with my dogs, my family and our community, with a cup of tea and a magazine, a breeze at the window, and the sounds of birds and lawn mowers ushering in a new spring. I want to experience and share with others the beauty and fullness of life all around me. This will require a softness of vision and compassion. I don't cause spots. What I can do is to do what the doctor tells me while gently training my eye back to bigger things, like supporting and connecting with all those I love.