Last week, I had a crazy idea: what would happen if I wore glasses for a week? I know I don't need them, but I wanted to see what everyone would think. And, for the record, I find glasses kind of cute. What I did not expect was to wax poetic to friends late at night about what I thought about the metaphorical lenses we see each other through and what glasses we really need to stop wearing.
As far as social experiments go, this was quite a boring one. I got the reactions I assumed I would get. "Oh, your glasses are so cute!" and, "I didn't know you wore glasses!" were said with cheerful smiles by other glasses-wearers until, after some conversation, I revealed they were fake. That's when the reactions shifted from, "Wow, cool!" to, "Wow...Really?" Many were indifferent, several laughed, and one friend even thanked me for suffering with other glasses-wearers for a week. That was my favorite reaction because although that was not my original intent, I did understand for a few moments just how frustrating it can be to have to wear glasses every day.
In the middle of the week, though, I laid on the bleachers of our college's soccer field staring at the stars wearing my red frames, and, as late nights typically go, I began to think deeper than a novelist with a doctorate in philosophy. One thought would not escape my mind:
We all wear glasses we don't need.
There it is. The one sentence, seven words, nine syllables that shook my world last week. If I'd done this social experiment in high school, I would have been relentlessly teased. In college, people did not care nearly as much. Somewhere between senior year and freshman year, our perspectives shift and suddenly what was weird in high school is acceptable, smart, and "cool" in college. I see a guy wearing a fleece High School Musical blanket around his shoulders riding a longboard to class, and I think he's brilliant. That kid would have been the outcast of his school if he'd done that before college. So what changed? I think our petty biases were exchanged for more cultured lenses hidden by a pseudo tolerance. Talking behind backs did not cease, but the masks of fake smiles have been more refined. Our subconscious is predisposed to judgement, so much so that we forget we are even judging in the first place.
As I sat under stars, looking at such pure beauty through lenses I didn't need, I wondered why we can't take off our glasses, our biases, our prejudices and replace them with something that looks like compassion, kindness, acceptance, love. Our lenses are tinted with anger and excuses, guilt and shame, fear and failure, tragedy and negativity. They say our past determines how we see our future. I just think we need corrective lenses to see our pasts through: to see the compassion that can come from shedding our angry shells; the redemption that can come from exchanging our guilt for forgiveness; the lives we can change by overcoming fear of failure; and the story of hope we can tell by surviving in spite of tragedy. It all stems from exchanging our tinted lenses for ones that are actually useful.
This is all easy to say, but why is it so hard to live out? I'm not really sure. Grudges are easy, forgiveness is difficult. Being angry is easy, being kind is difficult. We are a people who are quick to ignore, quick to judge, quick to put down. We are quick to talk badly behind someone's back, but slow to build up one another in love. It is a conscious choice to love. It is a conscious choice to put on glasses, see people through a lens of love. It is a conscious choice.
So, I choose to care. I choose to see the red frames laying on my book shelf as a daily reminder to see everyone as an individual with an individual story, an individual personality, and an individual path. I choose to build bridges, not burn them. I choose to look on the heart, not the outward appearance. I choose love.
