The Aperture
Sean Moore
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
If you’ve ever worked with a camera that doesn’t come attached to a pocket sized computer and the Internet, you probably know a little something about the aperture; and even if your photography experience is exclusively through Instagram, Mother Nature has lovingly provided two of them for you, only she deigned to call them pupils instead. An aperture is just a adjustable opening, limiting the amount of light that makes it through the lens and to the film, or the sensor, or your retina.
When it’s bright out, and there’s enough light to go around, the aperture can be set any way you’d like; make it a tiny pinhole for a wide depth of field, or open it up for a really shallow focus.
But when it gets dark out, when it’s too dim for the film or the sensor, there isn’t much of a choice: open up the aperture all the way, and narrow your plane of focus as much as possible, lest your photos turn into a blurry or unlit mess.
When things get crazy at work or at school, and I go heads down on some project that’s eating up all my mental cycles, my plane of focus narrows as well. Most emails are avoided, or outright deleted immediately. Most text messages, IMs, Facebook pokes, and whatever other silly methods of contact my friends try to us go unanswered. Most of the news I normally read goes un-viewed. Most of the other things that I normally do in my life go undone.
Did you catch that? Because there is an important qualifier, buried in there: “most”. Because some emails are important enough to read and reply to. Some texts are important enough to respond to. Some news is still important enough to read. Some things are important enough not to let go undone.
When it comes undone, what departs? When you find yourself too busy to do all the things you normally do in a day, what do you keep around, and what do you decide can be put off? Whether you know it or not, when you limit the time you have available to accomplish the things you want to do, you’re also making a judgement about what’s most important in your life. You’ve narrowed your focus, and with it, you’ve cut out everything, whether consciously or otherwise, that you don’t believe is important enough to devote time or attention to.
What we let stay tells us a lot about ourselves. Do we keep our social network addictions, sneaking peeks of our updates as we power through the all-nighter on some godawful engineering project? Do we instead blow off some steam by playing the latest edition of Angry Birds? Or perhaps instead we cannot possibly let a text go unanswered for more than five seconds.
Eventually, busy – the real, dire consequences, must-get-this-done kind of busy – passes. What then? Do all the distractions, all the mental drains that we declared were not important enough to us just a moment ago, come flooding back in, as if we decided to demolish the dam we just recently built?
There is certainly value in distraction. And even more so, there is certainly concern that what we decide is important when our time is precious may not be the right things cut is it so much to at the very least stop and ask ourselves about the value of what we leave behind.
Our time and attention are so precious. If it wasn’t worth having under pressure, what’s the use of having it around when we’re no longer under the gun?