Warrior Eyes [Ekasahpan’a Pu’i] by Mark Hatmaker

 

You are a hunter.

A stalking predator.

Your species was borne and shaped by forces that led Y-O-U, the only “hunting ape” on the planet to stalk game, read sign, divine past and future behavior of prey.

You are descended from gimlet-eyed Sherlocks Holmeses of the prairies, deserts, jungles, mountains, and seashores.

Whether the personal Y-O-U still hunt or use your evolved skills to gather sustenance or not, that innate urge to stalk, seek and emerge victorious is within you.

We “window shop” and “scroll” in attempts to satisfy a psychology and physiology that craves the hunt, that burns to seek anew.

We have turned these skills from matters of survival and sustenance to attempts to divine “Why Carol gave me that look?” or “What do these disparate events in the news really mean?” We seek to fill the tangible concrete skill gap that was formerly used to look for the overturned leaf and snapped twig that said “prey/dinner went this way.”

We have turned survival skills to the trivial.

We have turned the truly marvelous to the trifling.

We vicariously revel in post-game victories of teams we don’t really play for in a longing urge to recreate the true revel that followed a victorious bringing down of large game with a Band of Hunting Brothers and Sisters.

Much of what we do that appears to be civilized distraction, is but a pale imitation of hunting and gathering, reading sign-- attempts to satisfy a larger visceral hole that was a part of your species physiology, psychology, culture, hell, I’ll say it, spiritual self for far longer than this current quirk of history where we allow buttons, swipes, and false thumbs up or down to stand in for actual use of those opposable thumbs in pursuit of goals far larger and more meaningful than distraction from an eternal ennui.

Our bodies are living repositories of the attributes of an evolved hunter-predator.

With that said…

Much of what goes awry in the body/mind of the hunter-predator prior to inevitable senescence, entropy and sarcopenia is chosen atrophy of the physical, mental and spiritual attributes of the hunter.

We shall choose but one attribute today—

Hunter’s Vision, or Warrior’s Vision.

Keen sight was prized by all early hunting-warrior bands.

Hell, it’s still prized.

To be “keen eyed” “Hawk Eyed” “Eagle Eyed” “gimlet eyed” was vaunted.

Excellent vision was prized for eons and is prized now.

The question to ask is, Has vision deteriorated over time?

Consider this…

59% of people aged 25-39 wear corrective lenses.

I state the obvious, 59% is greater than half the population.

Compare that 59% in the 25–39 year-old population to 93%.

What is that 93%?

93% of people between the ages of 65 and 75 wear corrective lenses.

Clearly there is a natural macular degeneration.

This macular degeneration population increases rapidly after the age of 45.

The need for “readers” reaches the 90^th percentile.

There are two questions to ask.

One: Has this always been the case?

Two: Is there anything we can do about it?

We begin with Question One: Has this always been the case?

In March 2015, Nature published an article by Elie Dolgin titled The Myopia Boom with the tagline: Short-sightedness is reaching epidemic proportions. Some scientists think they have found a reason why.

I quote from the article itself.

“East Asia has been gripped by an unprecedented rise in myopia, also known as short-sightedness. Sixty years ago, 10–20% of the Chinese population was short-sighted. Today, up to 90% of teenagers and young adults are. In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.

Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago. By some estimates, one-third of the world's population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected by short-sightedness by the end of this decade.”

To be clear this is more than simply “More folks are near-sighted than there were before.”

More from the article.

“The condition is more than an inconvenience. Glasses, contact lenses and surgery can help to correct it, but they do not address the underlying defect: a slightly elongated eyeball, which means that the lens focuses light from far objects slightly in front of the retina, rather than directly on it. In severe cases, the deformation stretches and thins the inner parts of the eye, which increases the risk of retinal detachment, cataracts, glaucoma and even blindness. Because the eye grows throughout childhood, myopia generally develops in school-age children and adolescents. About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision loss.”

So, it seems that the increase in incidence begins in childhood but that does not explain the extreme jump to 96% past the age of 45.

Or does it?

It seems the habits of vision use in our early decades can indeed affect what will be wrought down the road.

So, what is surmised to be causing this epidemic of failing vision?

Initially the culprit was considered a gene expression. A luck of the draw that was insidiously on the rise.

“But it was obvious that genes could not be the whole story. One of the clearest signs came from a 1969 study of Inuit people on the northern tip of Alaska whose lifestyle was changing. Of adults who had grown up in isolated communities, only 2 of 131 had myopic eyes. But more than half of their children and grandchildren had the condition. Genetic changes happen too slowly to explain this rapid change — or the soaring rates in myopia that have since been documented all over the world. “There must be an environmental effect that has caused the generational difference,” says Seang Mei Saw, who studies the epidemiology and genetics of myopia at the National University of Singapore.”

Some pointed to bookwork and the use of screens.

Well, that answer holds a partial truth, but not the one you may expect.

“There was one obvious culprit: book work. That idea had arisen more than 400 years ago, when the German astronomer and optics expert Johannes Kepler blamed his own short-sightedness on all his study. The idea took root; by the nineteenth century, some leading ophthalmologists were recommending that pupils use headrests to prevent them from poring too closely over their books.

 

The modern rise in myopia mirrored a trend for children in many countries to spend more time engaged in reading, studying or — more recently — glued to computer and smartphone screens. This is particularly the case in East Asian countries, where the high value placed on educational performance is driving children to spend longer in school and on their studies. A report last year from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that the average 15-year-old in Shanghai now spends 14 hours per week on homework, compared with 5 hours in the United Kingdom and 6 hours in the United States.

Researchers have consistently documented a strong association between measures of education and the prevalence of myopia. In the 1990s, for example, they found that teenage boys in Israel who attended schools known as Yeshivas (where they spent their days studying religious texts) had much higher rates of myopia than did students who spent less time at their books. On a biological level, it seemed plausible that sustained close work could alter growth of the eyeball as it tries to accommodate the incoming light and focus close-up images squarely on the retina.

Sounds plausible, but… consider that there is another factor at play here.

Attractive though the idea was, it did not hold up. In the early 2000s, when researchers started to look at specific behaviours, such as books read per week or hours spent reading or using a computer, none seemed to be a major contributor to myopia risk. But another factor did. In 2007, Donald Mutti and his colleagues at the Ohio State University College of Optometry in Columbus reported the results of a study that tracked more than 500 eight- and nine-year-olds in California who started out with healthy vision. The team examined how the children spent their days, and “sort of as an afterthought at the time, we asked about sports and outdoorsy stuff”, says Mutti.

It was a good thing they did. After five years, one in five of the children had developed myopia, and the only environmental factor that was strongly associated with risk was time spent outdoors. “We thought it was an odd finding,” recalls Mutti, “but it just kept coming up as we did the analyses.” A year later, Rose and her colleagues arrived at much the same conclusion in Australia. After studying more than 4,000 children at Sydney primary and secondary schools for three years, they found that children who spent less time outside were at greater risk of developing myopia.

Rose's team tried to eliminate any other explanations for this link — for example, that children outdoors were engaged in more physical activity and that this was having the beneficial effect. But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work. “We had these children who were doing both activities at very high levels and they didn't become myopic,” says Rose. Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.

So is this the only factor?

If so, one would think the aforementioned Inuit who spend half the year in lowlight levels would be one myopic riddled population, and yet…

Some researchers think that the data to support the link need to be more robust…Ian Flitcroft, a myopia specialist at Children's University Hospital in Dublin, questions whether light is the key protective factor of being outdoors. He says that the greater viewing distances outside could affect myopia progression, too. “Light is not the only factor, and making it the explanation is a gross over-simplification of a complex process,” he says.

So, sunlight is indeed a factor, but so is exposure to great distances.

Or consider this University of Wisconsin study that showed those who engage in vigorous exercise at least three times per week over a lifetime stave off macular degeneration due to aging longer than those who do not exercise.

How large was the effect? Those who do not exercise were 70% more likely to experience macular degeneration.

The study did not separate indoor or outdoor workouts. Sunlight and exposure to distance was not a factor here.

The positive effect was activity itself.

So, as to Question Two: Is there anything we can do about macular degeneration?

The answer seems to be, yes, to a large degree.

We already have some clues.

·        Exposure to sunlight.

·        Exposure to vast distances.

·        Physical exercise.

It is curious to see that what state of the art science has to say is an echo of what was already assumed by Old Time wisdom.

More than a century ago, Henry Edward Juler, a renowned British eye surgeon, offered this advice. In 1904, he wrote in A Handbook of Ophthalmic Science and Practice that when “the myopia had become stationary, change of air — a sea voyage if possible — should be prescribed”.

In other words, sunlight, vast distances, and shipboard activities.

Back to the Nature article: “We've taken a hundred years to go back to what people were intuitively thinking was the case.”

All a wonderful start, but by any chance did the Indigenous tribes of the Americas that remained in touch with its hunting nature for far longer than we near-sighted “civilized” ones have anything to say about vision improvement and vision exercises?

Turns out—Yes.

The aforementioned big three were utilized but so were an additional 10 Practices.

These are grouped under the banner Ekasahpan’a Pui [Warrior Eyes] in our Suakhet’u Program, an 8-minute morning routine that brings all the senses online in a process called “Opening the Sensorium.”  Coming soon to The Black Box Brotherhood.

For info on The Black Box Project and all of our sundry products and training programs see here.

Or try our podcast: Mark Hatmaker Rough n Tumble Raconteur.