Peripheral Vision

It never ceases to amaze me just how much we subconsciously push off into our peripheral vision. How much, in a way, we take for granted about the constancy and consistency of our day-to-day existence.

Take a shower. Pack your bag.

Lock your door.

Ride the L.

A drizzle of minutiae constantly soaking us, never drying.

Think back: how much of your life do you remember? And with great certainty distinguish from one day to the next? It's why we suddenly stop and wonder, "crap. did I turn off the coffee pot?" or "where the hell are my keys?"

Rote. We're all creatures of habit. Well-worn rugs of design.

We nestle into the familiar, scotch-guard ourselves against the disparate. It's a survival mechanism that once allowed us to discern danger by realizing, "one of these things is not like the other..."

Yet, our minds are an insidiously industrious lot. If left to their own devices they spin their own tales, perceive dangers where there are none. Perhaps, this lays the fertile ground for the root of an inherent sense of 'the other.' Why we fear things that are different. That are not like us.

And why, in seasonal times of transition, the springs and autumns of our geographies, we do that mental accounting; kick back with the ol' reflective beard-tugging. Something's different. We sense it. We're suddenly forced to re-catalog something in our surroundings. Background noise suddenly comes into focus again; everything's in a temporary state of confusion, kicked up like a perceptual dust devil.

I once remember a commercial that sought to typify Utopia by a radio weather forecast announcing 'clear and sunny forever.' I lived through that once, while I was in South Carolina. The last summer was just such an idyllic state. And the heat and humidity aside, it was the closest thing to hell I'd want to experience: months of interminable sameness. Every day blended into the next.

It's easy to lose focus in those times when there's nothing concrete to latch onto. And despite the variability in temperature, this near-constant twilight of the last few weeks has had the same effect. And then I realized that it was because I didn't know what day it was. I couldn't pinpoint my location on a temporal map. Without it I had no sense of bearing.

Ultimately, it comes down to entropy. A little goes a long way.