It's Hard Not to Blink ..

I was settling down at the eye doctor's exam chair when she noted that the nurse took several tries to get the eye scan done on me previously in the other room. Indeed, that was true, because apparently the chore took longer than the usual number of attempts to get it just right.  The eye scan is an eye exam device that is non-contact, non-invasive, except that the patient must sit still and not blink.  You'll hear the refrain of the nurse's constant admonition, "okay, now take a breath, blink twice, and now, don't blink". This is so she can get a high resolution 3-D microscopic cross section photo of the eye. I thought she came close to the point of exasperation, as in a photographer using up an entire roll of film (ages ago when cameras still used film) to get a couple of still photos just right.

I commented back to my doctor that, "It's hard not to blink when you're told not to blink". She burst out laughing like that was the funniest thing she heard that day.  She said, "I know what you mean but it's just hilarious that you phrase it that way".

In my defense, if there is one, it's not easy to sit still with your chin set tightly against one of two chin rests, hunched forward, and to remain focused on that green cross hair that is located on either corner of the video screen.  And do it again using the other chin rest, focusing on the mark now located at the other corner. This test is done once a year, together with a session with the phoropter - for refractive error and prescription. Quarterly and no less than every four months, I get a regular session with the tonometer. "A tonometer measures the pressure of the eye by very gently touching the cornea".

Before I go any further, as a  public service message to the readers, please have a regularly scheduled yearly eye exam, especially for anyone past his or her 40th birthday. Today's routine eye exam screens for cataract and glaucoma - number one and two main causes for blindness, in that order, later in life.  Yearly screenings will catch either one in the early stage and both can be corrected either with eye drops (for glaucoma) or simple out-patient surgery for cataract.

Now, why is it so difficult not to blink; especially when told not to.  Well, physically it is impossible not to, because it is one of those near involuntary reflexes, since "blinking releases a tear film — which mostly consists of water, oil and mucus — to keep the surface of the eyeball smooth. It also prevents the eye from drying out, which can be uncomfortable". 

Blinking is naturally counterweighed by staring.  Oddly enough there is such a thing  as a staring contest and the record, so far, is 40 minutes and 59 seconds. I know you are now, right at this moment, actually staring at this page to see how long you can keep doing it, then you quickly realize it is not easy not to blink.

When we are faced with all the bad things that occur around us, by rising crimes in some of our cities, unprecedented squalor in our neighborhood, atrocities of war in far away places like Ukraine, it is hard not to blink. But we know blinking does not change or erase anything away.

"How many times do we blink in, say, a day? Researchers apparently spent a good amount of scientific funding into just that.

900 – 1,200 times an hour

14,400 – 19,200 times a day

100,800 – 134,400 times a week

between 5.2 and 7.1 million times a year

Each blink lasts between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds. Given how many times the average person blinks per minute, this makes up about 10 percent of the time you’re awake". 

Astoundingly, our brain does not "record" all the blinking we do because our memory of every day is a seamless panorama, whereas a computer or camera will have seams that delineate images between blinks. Probably not much of anything, but it's good to know.

Now, we segue to something else. 

It is not easy not to worry too when you're told not to.  In fact, it seems that the intensity of our worries is directly proportional to how much and how often we're told not to worry. An adage says, that the less we know about something, oblivious even, the less we worry, or not at at all.  Some of us will go as far as to say, "I don't want to know" - as a near perfect insulation from worry.  Or so it seems. That is because for some, the conditions that brought about, "I don't want to know", in the first place, are what purvey the paths to worry.

Children - humanity's ultimate carriers of happiness (until they reach adulthood, of course) - have the least of worries because they still know so little, and what little they know about what to want is the key to their happiness.  Notice though that they may blink a lot when they're excited and they stare when they are awed; either way, they look cute.  We lose that as we age.  Recovering that childlike state of mind might be the ticket we all could use.

The less often we convert what used to be mere "wants" suddenly into "needs", the less we worry.  In fact, the less we search for what we think we will want, the less we become needful of them (whatever those are).

And I say,

"The state of Happiness is at its greatest maximum when worry is kept to a minimum".