The Messy Moments of our Souls
Focal planes are funny things. You’re intersecting 3-dimensional space with a 2-dimensional object in hopes of capturing that “one shot.” As I play more and more with the cameras at my disposal, there’s an intricate dance that I must conduct in order to ensure the output matches what I want. That being said, even some of my mistakes end up being quite fun to look at.
I’m reminded that we take similar approaches to people. We have expectations (our focal planes) and we attempt to view their actions by that rubric. Our expectations can be as simple as “kindness” or “courtesy” or as complex as “left of center politics with an open religious mind.” When someone comes into our focus, be they family member or stranger, we view them through this plane and then wonder why the edges are blurry, why they don’t look like we want them to, etc. etc.
It is in humanity’s nature to be nonconformist. This may come as quite a shock to many, given how our emphasis as a society has always been on conformance and compliance, but with the infinite variability of human presentation, it’s impossible for us to accede to any sort of wholesale pattern or ideology.
The same “Aunt Sarah from Moscow, Idaho” who sits at home on a Saturday evening, writing screed after screed on her Facebook page about the “damn liberals ruining America” may appear to be no different from “Aoife from Galway” decrying the flood of immigrants coming to a “full” Ireland but, the nuances and subtleties of their experiences still vary wildly. Odious as they may be in presentation, we’re applying a broad brush to what drives their similar, outward behaviours.
By way of illustration, I want to draw your attention to this waterfall and to the moss seen earlier. They’re both captured from the same spot, one in front of the other. You can see the green moss on the striated stone of Tanner Falls in the foreground and some of the falls in the background.
Notably, your eyes are probably going to start hurting after a moment when viewing this scene. While you’re perceiving a waterfall and moss, you’re actually having to construct a complete picture from the blurred mess that this shot actually is. Static as it may appear in fixed 2 dimensional space, when you get closer to it, you’ll see the blurring and movement between the trees, on the moss; nearly everywhere is a mess.
Similarly, the moss, while more in focus, is bisected by a focal plane. The foreground is blurry and the background, while pleasing in its bokeh-laden goodness, removes context from the overall story being told. Where is that moss residing? How is it able to co-exist with the lichen and rock that seem to be part of its environment?
Drawing this to a conclusion, I want you to consider that perhaps your focal planes need some adjustment. That perhaps in this left — center — right continuum we’ve created that we’re focused too much on the absolutes of human expression and not the nuance. We’re spending a lot of time picking apart people for X, Y, and Z beliefs while the entirety of their existence is, like the waterfall above, a blurred mess of colliding ideas and inconsistencies.
Perhaps in all of this, I’m asking for us to give the same measure of grace to others that we are afforded in kind. That the measures of humanity we’re seeking to apply are, more often than not, bisecting soul and spirit and casting aspersions where they ought not to be. If we’re willing to embrace the blurriness, the mistakes, the messy bits of our souls, I’d wager that we’ll be far better off as a society than should we choose the opposite.
May it ever be so.
