Sometimes it’s just utterly relaxing and peaceful to just concentrate on what’s in front of you. Haven’t you got enough on your plate?
The constant vigilance in looking at the details in the periphery can be exhausting. Working that machine at the ophthalmologist/optometrist office that tests the integrity of your optic nerve is shockingly tiring. Concentrating on flashing lights in various degrees of strength and clarity, trying your best to notice all of them, can take it out of you.
You know how you must have peripheral sight in order to legally drive? Well seeing peripherally means seeing the whole picture, not just what’s in front of your nose.
Normally I’d be an advocate for socially peripheral vision, but I thought of another point of view on this. Maybe sometimes it’s alright to just skip all that detail in the periphery and just look at what’s on the plate in front of you.
Maybe it’s not a bad idea to cut out the periphery and give some space to all the rest of life going on around us. There is so much going on, all the time.
Concentrating on details can be good and beneficial. But, do you know the saying by Nietzsche, “the devil is in the details”? On other words, something may seem simple but upon closer examination of the details, they may reveal problems.
So, if you’re going for simplicity in life, skip the details. But if you’re the digging-deeper type, details will give you all the information you need or want.
The downside of those pesky details, is, in a word, anxiety. If we review too frequently, can you say, constantly, in the case of overthinking the details, it does nothing but create unease about the “what ifs” of life in the future.
I’m reminded of a guy in a news story about the Prince and Princess of Wales and their mental health vision for young people. He commented that we are forced by society to be “over-resilient” and we can’t relax in our vulnerability. That’s an interesting concept, “over-resilience.”
A standard greeting as we pass one another in the marketplace is, “how are you?” Most of us unthinkingly reply, “I’m fine, thanks.”
To be honest, I sometimes think before I reply to such niceties, and say forthrightly, “I’m okay.” “Okay” is code for so-so; I could be better, but I’m resilient. Most people get the nuance and nod with an affirmative, “yeah, me too.”
Occasionally it’s nice to just relax and let it be, “whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera sera….” Thank you, Doris Day.
I must confess that I have allowed “the details” of a particularly challenging month, work me into a tizzy now and again. Now that’s a word you don’t hear all that often these days.
When I looked up the word tizzy in order to confirm that it’s the right word to express my state on the occasional day filled with details that had to be worked out, during a difficult month, I came across an obsolete British synonym, sixpence. Oddly, that word reminded me of a little children’s book, The Tailor of Gloucester.
In the story, the lesser known of Beatrix Potter’s animal-based tales and my favorite, The Tale of Peter Rabbit being her most famous, the tailor gets worked into a tizzy, or sixpence. Long story as short as I can make it, the tailor becomes overwrought under the massive pressure to complete an important garment for an important person by a Christmas deadline.
The tailor gets sick and ends up in bed for a forgetful 24-48 hours or so, and the mice in the kitchen of his live-in shop, finish the embroidery on the mayors wedding waistcoat, except they run out of “twist” to complete the final details on the fancy formal vest. His grumpy cat, Simpkin must go out into the night and spend their last coins on the needed twist so that the amazed and now cognizant tailor can finish the embroidery.
The moral of the story, to me, is that if we work ourselves up into the proverbial tizzy over all the undone details that come at us, sometimes daily, we may miss the good stuff right in front of our noses, and make ourselves sick, to boot. And sometimes the details take care of themselves, if we back off and let them.
As it turns out, all the details in the periphery of your life might just include people, who are not in the least peripheral to your outcomes. These people, or details may go unnoticed if you’re not a detail-oriented person. Or you can acknowledge these folks as not just the details on the edges of your life but as vital support persons responsible collectively for your success in overcoming the challenges you face.
I’ve still got a keen peripheral vision and I want to thank all you “details” in my life. I appreciate you. Again, you know who you are.