On Going Blind

Today I went a meeting with a bunch of old people. Actually, to clarify, I went to a meeting with a lot of people, some of whom happened to be old. Anyway, there was this man there who is in his 80’s if not older, and he had a cane and needed his son to come into the boardroom to help him to his chair. I figured out during the first 10 minutes or so of the meeting that he was blind. He really fooled me though – he blinked at all the appropriate times and heard well enough to be able to turn in a certain direction when someone was speaking. (Before you start with the hate mail, I have very little experience with blind people, so it’s not hard for them to fool me.)

But then we started talking about finances, and he had questions. So the kind kind idiot next to him reached over, trying to be nice, and flipped the pages of the agenda and reading materials for Mr…we’ll call him Mr. Cane. And Mr. Cane felt the pages with his fingers, and moved them around a little, but obviously wasn’t reading a thing on them, because, oh right, HE’S BLIND. But Kind Kind Idiot Man just kept on flipping the pages. When Mr. Cane had a question, Kind Man would point to the page and say Here it is, right here. Are you kidding me? This continued for the entire TWO HOURS of the meeting.

So on the one hand, I thought to myself, Wow, this guy is such an idiot – can’t he see that Mr. Cane is blind? But then I thought that maybe Kind Man was just trying to be nice by giving Mr. Cane the benefit of the doubt, or sight, as it were.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Kind Kind Idiot Man did what he thought he should have done, whether it was idiotic or not. And then, to stay awake, I wondered what I would do if I were sitting next to Mr. Cane. Would I turn the pages? Would I ignore him because I can see that he’s blind and can’t read the pages regardless of whether or not I turn them for him? I had this inner debate for a while, until the meeting was mercifully adjourned 12 lifetimes after it started. Kind Kind Idiot Man took Mr. Cane by the hand and led him out of the room. When they passed by my chair, Mr. Cane reached out his hand as if he were trying to grab something to hold on to. If I had reached out to him even the slightest bit, he would have been able to grab my hand.

But I didn’t.

And now I feel bad. Granted, Mr. Cane got outside with some help and he was fine, but I wondered in that split second what it must feel like to be blind and reaching out for something you can’t see. Aren’t we all a little bit that way, though? Aren’t we all wandering through life, blind as bats, reaching out for something to hold on to?