Well, ladies
Clare wrote about her nine-minute walk between meetings and I read it and thought that is very Clare and then I spent two days being irritated by it in a way I could not explain.
It was not the walking. I walk. It was the way she blocked it on her calendar and called it non-negotiable, like discipline is something you just install and run. I wanted to argue with it. I did not argue with it. I stewed about it instead, which is a thing I do that I am naming here so that Dani does not name it for me later. 😌
On Thursday I had been writing for four hours straight and my vision was doing that thing where the words on the screen are technically in focus but nothing is landing. I was reading the same sentence over and over. Not because it was complicated. Because my brain had left and not told me.
I went outside. Not because of Clare. Absolutely not because of Clare.
I stood on my front step without my phone and I looked at the trees at the end of the street and I stayed there for about five minutes and something happened to my eyes that I want to describe carefully because it is the whole reason I am writing this.
They relaxed.
Not in a poetic way. In a physical way. I could feel the muscles behind my eyes unclench, the same way you feel your jaw unclench when someone tells you your teeth are touching. My eyes had been locked at screen distance for four hours, about two feet, and when I gave them something far away they did a thing that felt like stretching after sitting too long.
There is a name for this. Your ciliary muscles control the lens of your eye, and when you focus on something close they contract and hold. For hours. They do not let go until you look at something far away. The strain you feel at 3pm is not tiredness. It is a muscle that has been flexed since morning and nobody told it to stop. ☕
Five minutes. Outside or at a window. Look at something far away, the farthest thing you can see. Do not squint. Do not focus hard. Let your eyes go soft on something at a distance and just wait.
I went back inside and the sentence I had been stuck on made sense on the first read. My head was clearer. I had not rested. I had not napped. I had given two small muscles a five-minute break and they had been waiting for it all day.
I texted Clare and said "fine." She wrote back "the walk?" I said "no, going outside. Different thing." She said "same thing." I said "it is not the same thing, Clare." It is not the same thing. Hers is about legs. Mine is about eyes. The fact that both involve going outside is a coincidence and I will not be grouped. 🤍
Dani will say this is the 20-20-20 rule that every optometrist recommends. Every twenty minutes look at something twenty feet away for twenty seconds. She is right. But I am not going to do it every twenty minutes. I am going to do it once, for five minutes, when my brain tells me it has left. That is the version I will keep.
Five minutes. Far away. No phone. Let your eyes go soft. ✨
That is today.
