The Wholeness of a Loss
A quintessential question: if you had to lose one body part, what would it be? My friend, Carlo, sarcastically told me that I should choose my appendix, because it is basically useless, but I opted for the more meaningful loss: my eyes.
Of all my body parts, why my eyes?
Even if I know that many people would go, “But the eyes are the windows of the soul!”. I stray toward a different path.
Although the ability to see is always great, I think that if I lost it, I would not lose a lot. One thing I wouldn’t lose in my life is music. Without my eyes, I would still be able to listen to music, something that I treasure dearly. Without my eyes, I would still be able to use my piano and saxophone, two things that I don’t think that I could live without.
Another thing that I would not lose is food. Even if people say that seeing is part of eating, I beg to differ. To me, eating only needs two things: tasting and smelling. Without my eyes, I would not lose any of those. Even without my eyes, my taste buds and my olfactory receptors can bring me to places I could not have gone with my eyes. Both my sense of smell and taste can give me a strange visual journey, in spite of my blindness.
Along with the things I wouldn’t lose, why I would choose my eyes to be lost is because of my attachment to a certain Marvel superhero, Daredevil.
Daredevil, or Matt Murdock, used to be a regular child, until chemicals were coincidentally spilled into his eyes, permanently blinding him, but granting him heightened senses. Although he was blind, his heightened senses still allowed him to ‘see’ like the rest of us, as if he was not blind in the first place.
I idolized him for a while. It amazed me how he could still see even though he was blind, and he was even more perceptive than those who had actual eyesight.
In a way, Daredevil inspired me. Even without his eyes, he was still able to function like a normal person, even better perhaps.
Even if I would never be able to have such superhuman powers like Daredevil, he taught me that seeing isn’t exactly everything, and that there are other ways to ‘see’, and perhaps these ways are even better, more substantial.
With the inspiration of a blind superhero, and the things that I wouldn’t lose, my adamance in my willingness to lose my eyes is cemented.
But the more that I think about it, the more I realize how fortunate I am to have even the ability to think about losing a body part. I realized how privileged I am to have been born with a complete set of parts; no more, no less. Even if this quintessential question stifles the minds of many, the mind-boggling idea really is: should we really care about what we are willing to lose, when already have everything that we need?