I Just Learned a Thing!

I have always been in love with water. There's just something about that medium that's freeing to me in a way that air never will be. I move too quickly for air, you see. It's too thin to contain me, so I end up looking wild and jerky whenever I move. Water is thicker. It holds me in place more firmly, caresses me, even, and allows me to take on the guise of grace. I've always been oddly buoyant, too, so I can float in water while exerting no effort. It's the only place I can fully relax all of my muscles -- laying in a bed doesn't feel as good as floating, raftless, through a lazy river.

Here's another, more interesting way that water and I are related: Water let's me see. Most of you probably know that air doesn't let me see very easily. I've had glasses since I was nine months old. One of the main things that's wrong with my vision is that when I fully relax, my left eye crosses. (This is due to an eye condition called esotropia, which for me is a combination of muscle/focusing issues.) Obviously, when my eye crosses, things go blurry. Oddly enough, when I go under water and open my eyes, my vision isn't blurry, and my eyes aren't crossed. (Obviously the water acts like a lens, but why does it have my prescription?!) It's bizarre, and I've never fully understood it.

Until now! 

I've started watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on Netflix. This show is a 2014  reboot of Carl Sagan's show Cosmos that aired in 1980.   I had it described to me once as "Discovery Channel's Planet Earth -- But for EVERYTHING!" And, well, that's a very accurate description. I'm 26 minutes into the second episode, and I've had more mind explosions than I care to recount. I'm ready to go back to Episode 1, pull out a notebook, and take notes. 

Anyways, I just learned about the evolution of the eye, nothing I've ever really thought about before. As it turns out, the eye evolved to help our long, long, long, loooong ago ancestors to survive while they were still only living in water. The first creatures didn't venture out onto land until after the evolution of the eyeball. And, as previously mentioned, water acts like a lens. It bends light. So, when our ancestors first ventured out of water and onto land, they couldn't really see here either! 

So, considering that, evolutionarily speaking, humans haven't been around that long, I guess maybe I just have slightly under-evolved eyeballs. Somehow, characteristics of my eyes survived from the times when we were seeing underwater through today. 

Lucky me :)