Peripheral

To be peripheral is to be related to the edge of an object. Today, we focus on vision. Peripheral vision contains the things that are visible on the edges of your line of sight. It allows us to see and observe much more than we pay attention to. This was probably more necessary in primitive times when we needed to be on the lookout for things in the woods as we hunted and tried to survive. Today, however, it’s something most people just get checked at the eye-doctor’s and don’t really give it a second thought. In this post, we’re going to discuss the things that are in your “peripherals,” understand that there are things that you’ll likely never notice, and due to those things, understand why you should remain respectfully curious while interacting with people.

We all live our lives, people follow their purpose, people follow their paths, and they live their lives. If you spend time observing though, you start to see other people. You see the hundreds of people that you pass on a daily basis, whether they be in cars, whether they be walking next to you or past you. There are a lot of people also living that we often don’t notice. All these people have their own happiness, their own adversity, their own pain, their own ambitions, and they probably don’t notice you either.

This shows that there’s a lot that we don’t notice, a lot that may even be in front of us but that we still don’t see. Even when you’re talking to someone you may have known for years, there are things that will be in front of you but hard to notice, things that you have to pay attention to in the figurative edges of your vision. And maybe you can’t do this everyday, but try to live a day out of your head, just live through your eyes.What do you see? What are people doing? How many cars are going through the roads? Just observe, you may be surprised by what goes on around you.

With that, you should hopefully start to understand and get a perspective of how much you don’t see, how much you don’t know when you notice people, look at situations, or see certain things. Knowing this, you should try your best to live without assumptions. And if you want, you can expand your peripheral: you can start to see more, understand more, have more context, and have more information.

There’s many ways to do this. If you want to increase your literal field of view, become an optimist; happier people actually have wider fields of view. If you want to increase your figurative field of view, talk to people, care about people, be kind, and be curious but respectful. Ask people questions, be positive, make sure people are comfortable when they’re around you, and make sure that you’re strong enough to listen to people and know that their problems aren’t yours, so then you don’t have to feel bad if they happen to tell you their pain. There’s a lot of details that you may not notice in every picture that you see. That’s all for today, sorry if I sounded pushy or arrogant, but I made a lot of assumptions in my life, and it never worked out well. I hope that I can prevent others from making the same mistakes. Anyways, that’s peripheral, and the things you don’t see. I’ll probably take a break next week, but until I see you again, have a wonderful time. Peace.