Myopia and Impressionism

When you're very myopic, all you need to do at any time is remove your glasses and the world becomes an Impressionist painting.

As a kid at a long boring wedding ceremony, removing my specs made all the fairy lights turn into large bright drops, creating what I later learnt were bokeh-like effects. On a rainy day, a dreary grey landscape only needs a red umbrella and suddenly you're looking at an abstract masterpiece. The quirky (if slightly dangerous) thing too is that if you first see something without your glasses (e.g. waking from a nap), really familiar objects can, for a second, look totally different, launching your mind into new imaginings.

Sitting in the bus behind a rain-spotted window, the changing effects are intriguing: it's the equivalent of setting your camera at its widest aperture on manual focus. With my specs on, I focus on infinity and the raindrops on the pain are almost unnoticeable. Without my specs, the focus is on the rain drops and the background becomes mere washes of colour. It's quite fun.