Flotsam 4: My Personal Struggle and triumph over floaters

One afternoon I was invited to hear a motivational speaker talk about his  personal success as a sportsman. Something he said in his talk got my immediate attention. He said : "You concentrate on what you focus on". It seemed like a very obvious statement but the point he was trying to make was that in order to achieve something great one needs to fix ones eyes on something and focus on it exclusively. It suddenly dawned on me what an incredible truth that is. If we focus on what is bad in our lives, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. The more we focus on the bad, the more it dominates our life. And the more it dominates our life, the more stressed we become and the worse we feel. No wonder we are urged to "count our blessings". The more we focus on our blessings the less we see our personal hardships and the better we feel. From that day on, I stopped obsessing about the floaters. On a lovely summer day, I would not look up at the sky and purposely try to find the offending cobwebs. I started practicing looking past the floaters. Looking through the floaters. In the same way we need to look past and beyond our present difficulties. What applies in the cognitive world applies equally in the physical realm.

But how do you practice shifting your focus from the floaters to the real world when your vision looks a little like a dirty windscreen? One way that I found to look at this was to cast my mind back to when I was a child, playing hide and seek. Hiding inside the hedge, I could look through the gaps in the leaves and see the other children walking past. My gaze was so focused on the activity outside the hedge, I didn't see the leaves and twigs that completely surrounded me so engrossed was I in the world outside the hedge.

With time I learnt to always look through and past the floaters and they do not bother me to this day. Sure, I can see them if I want to. It is as easy as shifting my focus to the floaters and ignoring the world beyond them. Almost like studying the marks on the cars windscreen rather than looking at the beautiful road and scenery ahead.