Glaucoma: emotional and spiritual meaning

What glaucoma is

Glaucoma damages the optic nerve. Often the fluid inside the eye cannot drain, so the pressure rises. It is more common after sixty. Side vision goes first, which is why people notice it late. Drops, laser, or an operation lower the pressure. They are long care, not a short course. Acute glaucoma, with a hard painful eye, is an emergency. The fluid is aqueous humour, not a store of tears. The image of unshed weeping belongs to the spiritual interpretation. It is not the mechanism of the disease.

The emotional meaning of glaucoma

The spiritual interpretation takes the blocked fluid as all the tears that might have fallen across a life and did not. The pressure on the retina, and the sight that fails, are set beside that accumulation. Old rancour and a refusal to forgive are the companions it names. You can feel overtaken, submerged, and afraid of what is ahead. Tiredness makes ordinary life harder to accept. Refusing to see yourself ageing, and preferring not to see the pictures of the future, is one face of it.

A glaucomatous eye is compared to a magnifying glass. Something, or someone, is wanted closer, in time or in space, as if you were late. The goal is near, and a danger feels as if it is following. The narrowed field is like blinkers on a horse. You look only ahead. Chances seem to have been missed, and resentment sits with them. Things slip away at the moment you were about to have them. Life feels like a tunnel, fast on every side, familiar landmarks changing, and a deep sadness at losing what you held. French hears glauque in glaucoma: a dim, melancholy, miserable light. The questions are whether you want to know what the future holds, and whether any way through still exists. Possibilities appear and are missed. Freedom feels cut back. You want the past held still.

The tension is extreme. You feel close to cracking. What is offered is to lift the veil, to see with a little more tenderness, to stop clinging, and to live the moment that is actually here. Tolerance is the width the blinkers had taken away.

A gentler way to hold it

• Name one grief you never wept, without asking it to repair the nerve.
• Look sideways once today: a person, a room, a possibility you have been walking past.
• The drops stay in the eye. Forgiveness, if it comes, is for you. It is not a pressure reading.