Back to blog

My friend’s son is back for Winter Break from his freshman year of college. He’s exactly as he should be, completely solipsistic, as if the energy of reinventing himself somewhere else, with peers and snow, has completely deprived him of the ability to see his parents as anything other than useful scenery.
But he has grown, changed so much already even though he can’t see it.
A month ago, he left his contact lens in for too long because he was attending an event with friends and it caused a sore in his eye and for a few days he was functionally blind in one eye. He did not want to return home, he and his roommate and his friend took him to the Emergency Room and got it taken care of.
He thought it was a metaphor for something else. He said that.
He has encountered metaphor. Maybe it was mentioned when he was in high school but he got it now. He ‘saw’ that life has meaning beyond the superficial. Words have meaning, gestures have meaning and meaning has meaning.
He lost his sight in one eye for a few days but he gained the ability to make good decisions, to rely on himself and his peers, to solve problems and to “see” that he can survive, resolve, succeed ‘on his own’ (obviously he gets meals, a bed, a roommate, the invention of metaphors on his parents’ dime) but his loss of sight, the warning, the irritation, served him well, better and fuller than it might have at a previous time.
He understood that partial vision is still vision. That some rules, such as not wearing your contacts too long, have really solid reasons for existing.
And he saw, although he did not explain, how plentiful this metaphoric world is in lessons and signposts and reassurances. How something that might be awful could turn out to be just a hindrance, a scary one. How he has everything he needs to survive even such an event like this, relying on his own lights.
I don’t know what his tuition is, probably a lot since it’s a small private college, but whatever it is, if it gave him a rare, precious glimpse into the richness of the world of metaphor, it is time and money well spent.
Happy New Year!