What is foreground and what is background?
And how we experience the world
I was reading a book to my kids the other day when a curious thing happened.
It was a “word of the day” book that introduced new vocabulary in big, bold letters at the bottom of a page with an illustration opposite showing the word in action. So for instance, the word might be “devour” and on the other page it would show a funny drawing of a bear devouring something. As I was reading the book, one of my sons kept commenting on the drawings and ignoring the words: “Wow, that’s the same bear as in the other page!” he would shout. “Look at the color of the rabbit’s shirt!”
After a few minutes of this I grew frustrated that he wasn’t paying attention to what I wanted to teach. “No, that’s not the point of the book,” I complained. “Focus on the words. That is what’s important.”
But hold on a minute. What was I doing? What was I getting upset about?
In adamantly trying to teach this particular topic I was forcing my very particular perspective of the world onto my son. “This is what is important, while that is just extraneous.” But the thing is, my son sees the world differently. To me, the drawing was an irrelevant detail while for him it was the primary attraction. My son and I are different people and this was just a small reminder that we all see the world through our own eyes.
This experience of forcing a specific lens on children isn’t rare - in fact, it’s the main way we educate. “This is the point of the story.” “This is what is important.” “You aren’t focusing on what really matters.” “You failed to learn the lesson.” And while in some instances there actually is a correct answer, for most things in life that’s just not the case. Life is much more nuanced.
“You’re missing the forest for the trees,” we might say. “You aren’t seeing the bigger picture.” But what about the leaves? What about the roots? What about the squirrels and the shades, the colors and the smells? There is no one foreground and no one background. We can use infinite lenses. Each person’s mind a different world.
In “Why I like Myers Briggs (with dynomight's expansions)” I wrote about why I find personality classifications so valuable:
The main reason Myers Briggs is helpful is because there is a value in having a language around how we are different from each other more nuanced than “I am right. They are wrong.” Personality tests gives us a language to empathize with others and have productive conversations about how best to work together.
[…] For most of my professional life, companies I’ve worked at have mostly ignored the fact that people have different personalities. Of course everyone knows everyone is different, but there is no common vocabulary adopted. It’s rare to have team discussions about the team’s personality preferences. As a result, it’s not rare to have unproductive and unhappy teams with a lot of passive aggressive conflict. Since the teams don’t have good language for engaging on how they approach the world, they instead default to binaries and blinders such as “that person is just inconsiderate,” “that person is messy,” “that person is too emotional”…
One of the most powerful practices I sometimes use at work is explicitly thinking through Myers Briggs preferences. Moving into “I wonder how this person sees the world” is a much more valuable lens than staying mired in my own mind, frustrated by trying to prove that “I’m right.” Like my son with the vocabulary book, we’re often just seeing the world in entirely different ways.
The practice of meditation is in many ways a practice of shifting background into foreground. Our breath, for example, is usually not our main focus. We are similarly oblivious to the sensations running through our body and ignorant to our emotions. Meditation pulls these experiences into conscious awareness and exposes the rich tapestry our bodies and minds are undergoing at all times. Like eyes refocusing after staring at a nearby object and then shifting to the horizon, meditation shifts our consciousness so that after the practice we can perceive just a bit more of the infinity that surrounds us. We become a bit more open to how broad reality can be.
There is a beautiful poem by Mechthild of Magdeburg (a mystic poet that lived around ~1250 AD), here translated by Jane Hirschfield: “Of all that God has shown me”:
Of all that God has shown me
I can speak just the smallest word,
Nor more than a honey bee
Takes on his foot
From an overspilling jar.
Like the honey bee, each of us a small foot on the overspilling jar. Our world a fraction of the whole.
Shifting focus. Shifting lenses.
Turning background into foreground. Embracing each other’s worlds.
Another connection with meditation is the idea of compassion. If you can notice why someone has a proclivity for a certain way of seeing the world or working, you’ve found compassion.