Eyeballs are amazing.

If you're like me and introspective, interested if not outright obsessed with figuring out not just who we are but how we work, you can't help being intrigued by our eyeballs.


Tucked away inside bony structures that do NOT protect them nearly enough -- a simple poke with a sharp stick will splatter one -- our eyeballs working together show us the world. How they do it I can't begin to guess, any more than I know how this computer works. The difference, of course, is that one is man-made, the other a true mystery.


Once upon a time, Somebody or Something figured out that if we humans were to move about in our world and learn to work with it, we had to be able to see it. Thus, we have eyes, which really means eyeballs. Truly amazing inventions. Little worlds in themselves. Working with the brain, they give us whole lives in photo and video form.


But given their importance to our very existence -- how can you avoid a predator if you can't see it? how can you fall in love if you can't see your beloved's face? -- I've always been dismayed at how precarious their situation is, how endangered they are. An elbow in a pick-up basketball came can blind you forever on one side. (I know someone it happened to.) So can acid thrown by a lunatic ex-husband. So can any number of other things.


It may be a design flaw in our make-up that Whoever or Whatever created us didn't think far enough ahead to know that we'd be trying to put each other's eyes out or that we'd do it all by ourselves accidentally.

Think about it. Our arguably most important organs, the brain and heart and lungs, are all encased in bone, the skull and the ribcage respectively. Of course those protections can be breached, and often are, in car wrecks or murders, but for day-to-day living, our brains and hearts and lungs are pretty well-defended.


Our eyeballs less so. About the size of large marbles, and squishy to boot, these invaluable orbs are sunk into a bony circumference that only provides protection against blows from blunt instruments -- fists, clubs, stones -- bigger than itself. But any kind of sharp object, even a primitive spear, can penetrate and blind us. What's that all about?

We humans have devised some protections on our own: the masks of hockey goal tenders and baseball catchers, safety glasses lots of workers use, even sunglasses to keep out the sun's most destructive rays. But we had to come up with all those. Why didn't Nature install them in the first place?

I was just rubbing my eyeball because it was itching. And you know what? Not only was it not painful, it felt kind of nice. My eyeball, like a pet, seemed to like being rubbed. I wonder if my liver or my bladder would react the same. Not likely. The amazing eyeball, no?


I wish I could say that there's something you can do to prolong the lives of your eyeballs, but I don't have a clue. You can't exercise them, but there are drugs and surgical procedures that can correct problems. Stilll, for most of us, our eyeballs are standard issue, and we're stuck with them, for better or worse. They are what they are. And they're self-sufficient. They moisturize themselves continually even as they just keep going, year after year, blinking and blinking and blinking, seeing and seeing and seeing.

What can we do to keep them going longer? Not a clue.


Just get lots of sleep, I guess, and when you're awake, keep your eyes open.

You never know what you might see!