Ed’s Note
On New Year’s Day I signed up to go mussel foraging with friends on the beach at Keurbooms. An incredibly cheap licence gives you permission to spend the gloriously crisp early morning knee-deep in the low tide, picking nature’s bounty off the massive boulders, and then to feast like a king that very evening. (We have a chef in the group which, as you can imagine, raises the mussel bar significantly.) You need nothing more than a pair of gloves and a good knife, and you can probably do without these implements. I was also under the impression you need both your contact lenses. I somehow lost one before setting off on my adventure and wondered if I should call it all off and spend the day in regret that I had also left my glasses at home.
But it was New Year’s Day and I am annually exercised by the idea that I should begin the year as I intend to continue. Which, in this case, was practically blind in one eye. I would not make it into pilot school. I braced myself for disaster and decided to continue with the single contact lens because what will happen to my year if I let the obstacle of shortsightedness impede my progress? Call it faulty logic or an inordinately high tolerance for superstition in my thinking, but I stand by my decision. With my single trusty contact lens I ventured out to my car, drove myself to Keurbooms from Plett, and made my way onto the beach behind Enrico’s and the beautiful new cottages the Babylonstoren folks have erected to demonstrate what tremendous style looks like in a beach setting. Let me report, it was the best decision I could have made.
Lest you think I am a reprobate one-eyed cyclops, I should explain. The human brain is a thing of wonder. I found my vision was fine — more than fine: the neural pathways running between the optical-nerve stuff and my eyes appeared to rewire almost instantaneously. Crazy but true. Apparently, this is something ophthalmologists recommend you do regularly to cause just such an effect. Who knew? But something far more delightful than the admittedly joyous rewiring happened too. Because I had the one eye working really well at close range, I was suddenly seeing a world of detail on those boulders that I probably would have glossed over had circumstances been different.
An entire universe of creatures live on those rocks, little poop-like spongy things that spray the seawater like tiny volcanos from their pulsating centres, terrific seaweed in infinite guises and colours, stuff that looks like sand but is living and pulsating — and the mussels, of course, in various states of growth and symbiosis with hundreds of other little living creatures hanging out on the shells. A whole, entire world on a rock just doing its thing of a New Year’s morning. And little cyclops me just a small but intimately connected part of this infinite whole.
My Greek great-grandmother would say every impediment is for the good. Often it is quite hard to tell how this could be an actual thing and not just a way of appeasing your spirit in the face of horrible events unfolding on your path. This contact-lens situation was an instant demonstration that, as with every other crazy aphorism she embedded in my mind, she was absolutely on the money.
A rewiring for 2026 was clearly what I needed. A forced re-examination of what I think I know. A happy mistake that opened an entire alternate world to my line of sight. An unexpectedly new perspective that may be the best tool to carry with me into the unknown. A reset.
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Aspasia
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