Hiding in Plain Sight

On contact lenses, cereal boxes and the things that never occur to us

I'm 56, and I've been wearing reading glasses for about eight years. I've also spent a considerable proportion of those eight years complaining about them. They slide down my nose when I'm teaching yoga, fall off when I bend forward and disappear the moment I put them down. Which is particularly inconvenient when you need your glasses to find your glasses.

Then, a few weeks ago, my son asked why I didn't try contact lenses.

Well, there's a thought.

Eight years. I've managed to bring up three children, run a business and navigate all manner of life's complications, but apparently the possibility of putting a contact lens in my eye was beyond me.

It wasn't that I'd considered them and decided against them. I hadn't weighed up the pros and cons or worried about sticking something in my eye. The idea had simply never entered my head.

I'm now wearing a contact lens in my left eye. Just the one. Getting it in was quite an achievement, although getting the bloody thing out again proved considerably more alarming. I'm getting better at both, and I can now read my teaching notes without hunting for my glasses or retrieve something from the floor without sending them flying.

It's bloody brilliant. But what's really fascinated me is that for eight years, a perfectly good solution existed to a problem I regularly complained about, and I couldn't see it. I had become excellent at managing the inconvenience without ever questioning whether it was necessary.

I wonder how often I do that.

I have a friend whose mind works very differently from mine. She has a wonderfully wonky way of approaching things, and I've always been fascinated by the solutions she comes up with to perfectly ordinary problems.

Years ago, when our children were young, we went on a camping trip on the school field. At breakfast, we all had those little individual boxes of cereal. Remember them? The miniature variety packs we used to have as children?

My friend opened her childrens' boxes and poured the milk straight into them.

I was astonished. Here was a woman who had freed herself from the tyranny of the breakfast bowl. I'd never even realised I was living under its rule.

It was brilliant. No bowl to find, no washing up afterwards, and I would never, in a million years, have thought of it. Because cereal goes in a bowl. Everybody knows that.

Except, of course, it doesn't have to.

What I particularly love about my friend is that she wasn't trying to be clever. I doubt she gave it a second thought. That's just how her mind works. She sees possibilities where I see rules. And I can still remember the incident all these years later, which probably tells you exactly how great the impact of the milk in the cereal packet was to me.

There's actually a psychological term for this sort of thing: functional fixedness. It's our tendency to see objects in terms of their usual purpose rather than considering what else they might be used for. I'm tickled that there's a proper name for it. It sounds considerably better than being a bit unimaginative.

But I don't think it's just about objects. We do it with all sorts of things.

At work, in organisations, in our homes, we inherit ways of doing things and carry on doing them, sometimes long after they've stopped making sense. Ask why something is done a particular way and the answer is often, "Because we've always done it that way."

We all know that answer is pretty poor and yet apparently I'm quite happy to apply the same reasoning to my own life.

We get so used to our arrangements that we stop noticing they are arrangements at all. They become facts, the way things are. And we can be perfectly aware that something isn't working without ever considering that we might do it differently. Instead, we become increasingly accomplished at putting up with it.

Of course, there's a very good reason we don't question absolutely everything. Imagine having to reconsider how to eat your breakfast, get dressed or open a door every single morning. We'd never get out of the house. Habits are useful, familiarity makes life manageable, and I have no intention of starting each day by challenging the conventional use of cutlery.

But there is a price to pay for all that efficiency. Sometimes we stop seeing the alternatives.

And I've started wondering whether this goes further than contact lenses and cereal boxes, because there are things we don't see simply because they haven't occurred to us, things we've become so accustomed to that we've stopped questioning them, and things we don't see because we're not ready to see them.

That last one is rather different.

We can spend years believing we're incapable of something, often on the strength of an experience we had a very long time ago. We decide we're not sporty, not creative, not confident, not the sort of person who does whatever it is we're contemplating. And having reached that conclusion, we rarely bother to test it.

Sometimes someone else sees something in us that we don't recognise ourselves. Or we find ourselves doing something we would previously have dismissed as completely beyond us. I find it interesting how attached we can become to our ideas about who we are, even when those ideas aren't particularly flattering.

And then there are the less comfortable discoveries. The moments when we suddenly recognise something about our own behaviour that we've been spotting and condemning in other people for years. Or someone makes a perfectly innocent remark that changes how we understand a situation. Occasionally we realise that something we've believed for years might not be true at all.

Those discoveries aren't always welcome. Sometimes we'd be quite happy to go back to not knowing, thank you very much.

But once we've seen something differently, it's surprisingly difficult to remember how we saw it before.

I find that fascinating, particularly when I think about the people in my life who approach things differently from me. I like to think I'm reasonably open-minded, but I suspect there are all sorts of possibilities I overlook because my brain is too busy following its usual routes.

My son didn't think he was offering me a life-changing suggestion. He was probably just tired of hearing me complain about my glasses. My friend certainly wasn't attempting to teach anyone a lesson over breakfast. She just wanted some cereal.

Neither of them was trying to be particularly insightful, and yet both made me question something I'd taken for granted.

It makes me wonder what else I've accepted as inevitable without ever considering an alternative. I am sure the list is large, although by definition I haven't a clue what they might be.

Perhaps that's one of the pleasures of having people in our lives who think differently from us. They notice things we've overlooked, question things we've never thought to question, and occasionally come up with a solution so obvious that it's mildly embarrassing.

I'm not sure whether my new contact lens has made me any wiser, but it has made me considerably less tolerant of the phrase "That's just the way things are."

And if anyone has any other blindingly obvious solutions to problems I've been complaining about for the best part of a decade, I'd be very interested to hear them.

Preferably before I'm 64.