Reading is one of those activities that I love, and is an important part of my normal life. An ideal day for me will consist of at least an hour of reading books--not Internet stuff, mind you. But my non-work activities these days center around caring for my vision, and doing things that promote it. Maybe that's a mistake. After all, what is my end goal? My end goal is having normal vision, and a normal life, doing the things that I naturally prefer to do. That includes one of my favorite things: scanning pages of text, relatively close-up, for prolonged periods of time.
Last Saturday I spent around four hours reading Douglas Murray's new book The War on the West, which is a fantastic book, by the way. I had to tear myself away from it. Douglas Murray is an absolutely fantastic author. Anyhiz.
But I found that reading it was quite work-intensive. It was odd. It was an interesting combination of work and pleasure. It was pleasurable because the book is fantastic, but it was also work-intensive, because it took a lot of effort to read the book and use my eyes in the right kind of way: using both eyes.
I've talked about this in previous entries, but when I read books and text, I'm careful to use both of my eyes. I try to use my right eye as I read things from the right, and the left eye as I land on the left side.
I try to follow this advice given here by Tim Ferriss (it's really quite thought-provoking and potentially life-changing if you spend five minutes to watch the video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeOHqI9SqOI
I don't start at the beginning of the left, and I don't end at the very end of the right. I try my best to use both eyes and leverage and build my peripheral vision. I found it quite effortful because I found when I switch from left side to right side, I have to work quite hard to see the words on the right, and really strain to see on the right's periphery, because my right eye input isn't as strong as my left eye input--even now as I'm looking at my own text.
Despite all of that, I continued. Interestingly enough, I think this had a large positive impact on my vision for the rest of the week. When watching TV or looking off in the distance, or with flitting my eyes from one object to another, I had to do remarkably little correction. It was a large noticeable difference from the previous week. Maybe going back to normal activities and living my normal life is what was needed, after all: albeit, doing normal activities in a mindful way--not the old way.
It does take me back to one of my oldest entries about Heather showing me her Columns exercise, which was what finally brought her to stereopsis. It's an exercise I describe here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K49r34wN91g&list=UUl92tD7n6NCy4EQE0Alizmw&index=14&t=11s
In essence it's an exercise that forces you to use both eyes: flitting from the left column of numbers to the right column of numbers using each eye, as you do so. You're forced to use both eyes because there's a barrier between the columns. It's an exercise which achieves almost the same thing as the new exercise I'm doing now: reading books conscious to use both eyes as well as the periphery of each eye. Using my left eye for the left side, and my right eye for the right side--and if you want to supercharge the results, try to use the in-between areas, by using the peripheral vision. It is quite a workout. I think this will be fruitful, and perhaps take me to my end goal.
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