A Piece of Blur

Being a parent often means coming up with analogies of wisdom, that children can resonate with, so that they can understand much larger concepts, easily. I expect that a lot of the "world's wisdom" has been born through the need for teaching children in ways that they will remember, so that they can apply what they have learned in their own future needs.

Last night at dinner, we were talking about a puzzle that Smallsteps' grandparents got for her a couple weeks ago to complete whilst she was ill. However, she said that it was "too hard" because it was 1000 pieces.

This does not make a puzzle hard.

The number of pieces are meaningless.

Because, until the image is finished, it is only required to look at one piece at a time. Once finished, the final image becomes "one piece" that gets absorbed as a singular, with the 1000 pieces blurring into one picture. But even then, it is actually broken into different gradations. As I said to Smallsteps, completing a puzzle is similar to eating an elephant, one small piece at a time.

The difficulty is in human nature.

The real challenge is with patience and progress, where we tend to want results faster than we are able to achieve results. Some people say they love learning, but what they actually love is to learn something. For the majority of skills, if we could click our fingers and have it, we would do that rather than going through the lengthy and frustrating process of for instance, learning a language, or learning the skills to paint well.

And as said, even though we chunk our visual field and understand it through the context of what is seen, it is still experienced in gradations. For instance, while we have a sense of what we are looking at, if we hold our thumb out in front of us and focus on the nail, that is about the size of our sharp focus area. From that point and quite quickly, everything else starts to blur, like in a radial gradient. However, because we have pretty clever brains, we are still able to process information that we don't see clearly, like a flash of movement out of the corner of our eye that makes our head swivel, to focus more intently with intention on what has grabbed our attention.

Fuzzy logic.

That is not the actual meaning of fuzzy logic.

It is quite interesting to think that all of our sharp visual experience through our life is coming in through the size of a postage stamp. For example, focus on a word in the center of one of the paragraphs, and then see how many other words are readable without shifting your focus. This will be affected if on a large screen or a phone, but most people aren't able to read too many either side of their focus area. Maybe with practice, we could improve our abilities to improve our blur interpretation.

Smallsteps is quite interested in how the body operates, so I did another test with her to show how her peripheral vision works, by standing behind her as she looked straight ahead, and moving my fingers in until she could notice them, which was a point where my fingers were aligned with the back of her head. Then, I did it with my wife, and the point was aligned with the front of her head. This is because our peripheral vision narrows a few degrees per decade, so by the time we are at the end of life, we have lost 20 to 30 percent of our field of vision. This is also what makes driving more difficult as we age, as we notice less, as well as turn our heads less - yet, we don't actually notice that we are losing our vision.

The puzzle was mostly completed by my wife and I, with the last few pieces being put in by Smallsteps. It was quite a nice, mindless activity to do, and while my wife complained at times about not finding the right pieces, what I did was come up with a "system" to aid me - one that my wife was too proud to employ. I named parts of the pieces, so that when I was looking for a particular piece, I could quickly filter out what was not the piece, and focus on the ones that had potential.

For instance, in the image of this article, it is a "man piece, with a small head, even arms, with a weird left leg and a fat right leg." There were also two heads, three heads, side heads, skinny arms, long arms, skinny legs, fat stomach... my wife thought it (me) quite stupid.

But it worked for me.

Because it allowed me to take small pieces and put it into a context that provided meaning for me. It was taking a piece of the puzzle, and breaking it down into more pieces of another puzzle, one that only had to meet the needs of the pieces it was going to connect with, and in so doing, become a part of the whole.

While I didn't discuss this with Smallsteps, I do see our lives similarly. Much of our attention, is drawn to very narrow focuses at any point of our awareness. We see our whole world through a tiny window, but apply what we see as if it is the whole world. Because of the experience of the blur that surrounds our focus, we get the sense that we are experiencing more than we actually are, meaning that the image of our life is made up of a massive mosaic of postage stamp-sized pieces of experience. It is like those images, that are made of thousands of other images.

Anyway, there might not be much wisdom in this article, but I do believe that reflecting on these kinds of things can bring us perspective. For instance, how many of the things in our lives do we see as hard, when all they actually are, are a series of small tasks. Do them, and the job is done easily.

As everything is just a series of steps, what is actually hard to do?

Each thousand word article, starts with a single word, which starts with a single letter.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]