The Eyes Have It
Have you ever considered how much your eyes work, and how little you think about them? Until they don’t work. Then you think about your eyes all the time. And blindness, inconvenience, and discomfort.
Think of your eyes as muscles because, guess what, they are. And just like all the other muscles in your body, they need exercise, activity, and participation in your daily life.
In the hierarchy of how well you move, your eyes are most important. Without sight, you stumble, slow your pace, widen your stance to balance, trip, bang into things, and fall. With sight, those threats to your body are reduced, and you go along your merry way, oblivious to the importance of your eyes. It behooves you to care about them.
In the course of a day, we stare either straight ahead or down for most of it; at computers, books, the road view beyond our car, text messages, food, television, or each other. Rarely do we look at something in the corner of a room without moving our head to stare at it straight on. We move to accommodate our vision, instead of the other way around.
This sets up a pattern of behavior, a habit, that does our vision no great good. It’s a use it or lose it scenario. The muscles around the eye atrophy, vision narrows, then decreases. We assume that it’s old age. Once again, wrong thinking.
What if we approached our eyesight (acuity) and vision (interpretation) as a muscle to be trained? What if we consciously moved the six extra ocular muscles surrounding our eyeballs more? Would it improve overall functionality of our body? It certainly couldn’t hurt, and it could immensely help.
When all the parts of the body move freely with good range of motion, the whole body moves freely. A leg released from a cast doesn’t move well after immobility for weeks. Same with the eyes. By moving them more, and in all directions at all speeds, acuity and interpretation may improve. Overall mobility gets easier. Peripheral vision increases, thus balance improves, and confidence in movement grows. You move more because you feel confident about moving, and because you can move more, you do so. Brain function improves when mobility is practiced. Dementia may be thwarted.
It can all start with your eyes. They are attached to your body, and they need care. Move them more: up, down, corner to corner, side to side, circles, squares, letter shapes. Really, any kind of movement outside of your normal, dull, predicable eye movements have the potential to improve overall health and functioning ability.
It all starts with your eyes.
That’s Aging Intelligently.