In my second year of Ayurvedic medical school, my eyes started burning around nine o’clock every night.
I did what most students do. I rubbed them, blinked hard a few times, and went back to the screen. Exams were close. The lecture slides were on my laptop, the reference texts were PDFs, and the practice questions were on my phone. My whole education had quietly moved onto glass, and I was reading it for twelve or thirteen hours a day.
The irony took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. By day I was memorizing Shalakya Tantra, the branch of Ayurveda that deals with the eyes and the head. I could recite the old lists of what aggravates the eyes: too much close focus, too little rest, dryness, grief, staying awake into the night. By night I was doing nearly every one of those things, with the textbook open in front of me telling me not to.
I treated my eyes as equipment
I treated my eyes as equipment. They were the instruments that moved information from the screen into my memory, and when they hurt, I filed the pain under friction. Something to push through.
If you had asked me, I would have told you I was paying attention better than at any point in my life. Twelve hours a day. Total focus.
But I was not paying attention. I was narrowing it.
One night that winter the power flickered, and I looked up from the laptop into the sudden dark. When the light came back a moment later, I could not quite focus on the far wall of my room. Everything past arm’s length stayed soft, like a photograph taken in a hurry. It sharpened again within a few seconds, the way it always does, and there was nothing medically dramatic about any of it. Still, those few seconds frightened me, and the fear was not really about my eyesight.
It was the realization that I could not
It was the realization that I could not remember the last time I had looked at anything far away.
My desk sits beside a window. Past it there is a neem tree, a water tank, and a long view over rooftops that turns pink for about ten minutes every evening. I had not seen that view in weeks. The sunset had been happening at the edge of my vision, six feet from my chair, while I stared at a rectangle forty centimeters from my face. Nothing had blocked the window. I had simply stopped being a person who looked.
That was the part that stayed with me. Nobody takes your attention from you. You hand it over in small amounts, without ceremony, until looking at one small bright thing feels like the only kind of looking there is.
The narrowing had not stopped at study
And the narrowing had not stopped at study. I was eating at the desk without tasting much. Friends’ messages got skimmed and half-answered. My mother would call, and some part of me would keep scrolling while she talked. The eyes were only where the constriction finally became painful enough to notice.
I started with them because they were what hurt. Ayurveda keeps a set of small, undramatic practices for the eyes, and I tried the ones my professors had described. Palming: rub your hands warm, cup them over closed eyes, and sit inside the dark of your own hands for a minute.
Distance gazing: lift your gaze from near work and let it rest on the farthest thing available, without hurrying it.
Splashing the eyes with plain cool water in the morning.
Closing them fully, several times an hour, instead
Closing them fully, several times an hour, instead of the shallow half-blinks a screen trains into you.
I want to be careful here, because honesty is the habit my education is supposed to build. I cannot tell you that these practices are proven therapies. Some have barely been studied at all. What I can tell you is what happened when I did them, and it had less to do with my eyes than I expected.
Palming turned out to be the first time in months I had been in darkness while fully awake. A minute is long when there is nothing to look at.
I could feel my heartbeat in my palms,
I could feel my heartbeat in my palms, and underneath it, how fast I had been going. My jaw was clenched. My shoulders were up near my ears. My breath had gone shallow in the way it does when the body has quietly decided the whole day is an emergency. None of that was new information. All of it had been happening while I studied. I just had not been present for it, because every part of me was pressed up against a screen.
Distance gazing did something stranger. When my eyes settled on the far rooftops, my thinking loosened. Thoughts became slower and less insistent, the way conversation drops when you step out of a loud room. I do not believe this is mystical. The eyes and the mind seem to strain in the same posture: fixed, close, gripping. Offer one of them a horizon and the other appears to accept it too.
Slowly, I understood that my tired eyes had never been an obstacle to attention. They were a message about it. The strain did not come from seeing too much. It came from looking at one thing, too close, for too long, and calling that focus.
Whatever attention actually is, it seems to need
Whatever attention actually is, it seems to need what the eyes need: distance as well as closeness, darkness as well as light, and the regular admission that a world continues past the edge of the current task.
My eyes still get tired. I am still a student, the screens are not going anywhere, and I would not want them to. What changed is smaller than a cure and more durable.
When the burning starts now, I do notpush through it, and I do not resent it either. I close my eyes for a while, or I go find the neem tree, and I take the interruption as what it is: one of the more honest parts of me, reporting where my attention has been.
I used to think rest was what attention
I used to think rest was what attention cost. Now I think rest is what attention is made of.
The pink light over the rooftops still lasts only ten minutes. Most evenings now, I am at the window for it.
About Joey Dua
Joey Dua is a BAMS student who runs Darakhtveda, an Indian Ayurvedic brand whose firstproduct is I-Care Eye Drops. He writes about eyes, screens and rest, including a plain-spoken guide to the 20-20-20 rule, in the way he is being trained to practice: say what is known, say what is not, and say which is which.
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