Lately I have been thinking about my senses become duller and duller as I age. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, recollection, taste – not losing them but they are not as intense as they used to be. Actually sorry, I am using my conclusion as an introduction to something I will tell. I was not really thinking about the above in a highly conscious way at all. I just told myself the other day that I wanted to shower blindfolded and see (or hear, smell, taste, touch) what happens. In the shower I normally first wash my face with my eyes closed. Today, once I reached the point of feeling no soap security, I still did not open them again. I kept them closed until I was out, dried, back in a housecoat (it is Saturday) and sitting in front of open waffles to write about the experience. Below are observations/thoughts of note in mostly chronological order:

For most of the shower I found that I was replacing my vision with mental images of the shower around me. Not necessarily the important things like where the shampoo and conditioner are and don’t knock over that can of shaving cream but things like the colour of the shower curtain and the fact that a vent is above my head.

At moments the urge to open my eyes was very strong. Maybe dehydration from last night’s drinking had something to do with it. Right now my eyes feel dried up and tired. I want to exercise them, stretch them, open-shut, and open-shut, and wide.

I had thoughts of falling asleep. My mind was being tricked into thinking it was bedtime because the go to sleep signal (shut eyes) was given. My breathing also became a lot slower, sometimes stopping and I had to remind myself to take bigger breaths.

Most things in the shower I could do with ease because I have memorized the body movements. I got thrown off trying to find my sponge hanging from part of the shower fixture. I was looking for the fixture first and got lost on the wall. I always get lost on walls…lose my perception of distance up/down/left/right.

(Side story: when I was younger we visited some family friends and stayed overnight. I stayed on the top bunk in a room with a girl the same age as me. During the night I slept-walked off the bunk and ended up on the floor by the closed door, next to a dresser. I woke up and could feel the door, feel a wall, feel something wooden beside me, but everything was dark and I could not remember where I was. I was trying to find the doorknob…maybe there would be light outside the door. But I was lost on the wall and the door – could not remember how high a typical doorknob would be placed. Pawing at the wall I panicked and resorted to screaming for help. My mother came. The next morning I came to breakfast with a very very very red face.)

I faced my first real challenge after the shower. It was time to put on face cream and I use a type that requires application of two liquids from two bottles of identical form and one should go on before the other. How do I tell the difference? It took me a couple of moments, holding the hard bottles in my hands, to realize that I could shake the bottles and distinguish them by the density of liquid inside – one was more watery than the other. This made me think a lot about the details that we store in our minds that are not so frequently accessed.

Actually, another problem that I faced before coming out of the shower was the issue of product quantity. How can I tell the amount of shampoo or conditioner being dispensed? It was complete guesswork. In my head there was no information on how long I should squeeze the bottle, what a certain amount might feel like in my hand…I have always calculated this using only visual information.

Movement out of the shower and into my room was harder. In the shower I was in a confined place and could easily make mental images of the space around me. I was comforted by constant walls. Coming out of the bathroom, there was uncertainty in space beyond my arm’s reach. To compensate, my mind made walls around me. Moving in a wide space I was still mentally in an area similar to that of the shower – perhaps even smaller.

The room smelled sweeter than before. I finished drying, put on my housecoat and sat down at my desk. Reaching for waffles, I found its coldness right away. Something was on top – one of my Japanese books. I moved it over thinking about how I was using it prior to having a shower. This made me think about relying on recollecting past actions/events when you cannot use visual information. We see the states of things with little processing in the conscious mind…the eyes guide. Is this blindness good for exercising 思い出すこと? (=omoidasu-ing… I like the Japanese word because 思う is to think and 出す is to take/send out…it creates a better image of recollecting, remembering, collecting thoughts, bringing thoughts up.)

Now I have the window open. A cool breeze is coming in. I can feel it intensely on my bare feet. The air is sweet with the aroma of my shower products and the sun makes things glow.

My mind feels refreshed. There are still brain cramps from drinking last night but it is refreshed in terms of thought generation. I am not thinking the same thoughts that cycled over and over before my shower and I feel as though I have a quickly reflex to act on ideas. Heh - this can be a good OR bad thing but in my case I think it is currently good. I tend to get ideas, think yeah that would be interesting, but then not act on them and instead occupy myself with the useless chatter in my head (ex. my teeth are too crooked, I need to buy more milk, etc).

Two thoughts that came and were acted on immediately:

(1) I looked around me and thought about photographing junk piles and signs of usage around the home to capture activities and experiences in spans of mundane time. The pictures below are this morning:

(laptop
a Halls that will never get eaten because my cough is gone
folders with papers to read for thesis
FANCL receipt for face cleansing products I spent too much money on
an empty pack of のど candies that I have recently become addicted to (remainder from my cough experience)
a box that the vase from my glass blowing experience was shipped in - it seems like such a good box I can’t part with it so it is now the base of my FANCL calendar - reward for spending so much money on their products in hopes of virgin-like skin
a red plastic bag that feels too good to throw away
the USB cord for my camera
mail concerning the 10k race in 3 weeks
a catalogue that was subscribed to by former resident of my room….I’ll have to write about its contents another time)

(when I look at this picture I can remember the dreams that I had before the bed obtained this state. it was a really deep comfortable sleep. in the morning I did not want to get out of bed.)

(2) I started to write this in my usual manner – going straight through from beginning to end – then remembered that I would forget all my thoughts a third of the way through and stop writing. So I quickly made points of everything I thought about. I always think I should do this when I write but still, usually I don’t and then I get writer’s block and then I stop. The above was successfully constructed using the first-make-points method

I don’t know if this end bit is related to my 15 minutes of blindness but I think I will continue to incorporate periods of blindness into my routines in order to sharpen my dulling senses and refresh the lesser used functions of my brain.