Things we take for granted

As I said previously I am reading a book titled "The Curse of the Singles Table: A true story of 1001 nights without sex." I am still reading it, and enjoying it, but since I had to attend a band concert at my children's school I decided that it wasn't an appropriate title to be caught reading in the bleachers while I waited for the performance to begin.

So, to be safe, I brought along another book titled "An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales" by Oliver Sacks. I've only read a majority of the first chapter which details a painter that was involved in an automobile accident and several days later began to realize that he had become totally colorblind. You may or may not be aware, but when a person is considered colorblind they have different colors that they may not be able to see, it is rare for someone to actually be TOTALLY colorblind. What makes this story so much more interesting is the fact that the man is a painter, so his life has revolved around a world of color. Eventually this caused the man to have difficulty with being social and even sexual with his wife. Could you imagine being intimate with a person that has no flesh color at all? It would be like being with a corpse, talk about ruining the mood. To this man life was almost not worth living. Kind of like Socrates that took death over a life without philosophy, this painter would prefer death over a life with no color. Luckily, he found a way to work around his disability, or so I think he did, I haven't quite finished the chapter yet.

I love a book that makes me think. This story made me realize how much we take for granted the things in our life that seem so small but are really huge. They go unnoticed because we always have them. Color is part of our visual world, and we never stop to realize what life would be like without it. Imagine eating an apple that was not red, but instead black. Wouldn't it make you lose your appetite? It would probably do wonders for my diet, but I wouldn't want it to be permanent, only when I felt the desire to pig out. Well, this is how life was for the painter. Look around...take in all the color that you never really notice in your world. Imagine looking into someone's eyes and never really seeing its real beauty. Just imagine for a moment a colorless world. Weird, huh?

Another thing, those that are colorblind tend to be born with it. It isn't so difficult to imagine a world without color when you never had it. Although I guess it could be worse. One could be totally blind. Imagine having been born blind and never knowing what you actually look like. Could you have a mental image of what you look like when you have never seen any face, let alone your own face. I guess in this case you would use your other senses, such as feel, to discover what you look like.

Right now I'm feeling pretty grateful.