Focus

It is November 19th. The year is 2015 and the hour 10:33pm.

I have tirelessly tried to go to bed in the 9ish time frame, but my bed has received me at way later hours this past semester. Is a pillow really that hard to go to? It seems my pillow is far from anything fluffy because I have ceased to run to it with abandon and child-like joy. These are some of the things that happen with age. Right?

So today here is what I saw. And here is what I learned.

Standing right in front of me, my computer teacher had his hands in the air. His mouth and hands were working together to communicate in some way, but all I was getting was a blur. Fragments of noise registered in my ears while I tried penciling down their interpretation in my notes, but I wrote nothing. Literally, my pages were filled with blank confusion. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t on earth at that point in time. Then it hit me. He was lecturing and I was not listening or taking notes. At least any good ones.

How many of you see things in a blur? You know there is color and noise, but you can’t quite catch things in time to truly listen and feel what is going on around you. By the time you slow down, all the time you thought you had has turned into yesterday and while you spend time thinking about all of yesterday your today is ticking away.

I don’t doubt we all feel that way.

What I have noticed is that we are a people busied by many things and unfortunately being focused is no longer a skill people have.

F O C U S: to pay particular attention to or to adapt to the prevailing level of light and become able to see clearly.

If you’ve used a camera, you know what it is like to capture a moment. To frame in a single shot the beauty and life of people, places, and things all around us. And for any shot, we need focus. We have to consciously rotate the lens in order to sensitively encompass what is in the scene before us. No matter what we do, without focus, we will have points where lines become blurred and defining angles lose their form.

Tell me, can we afford to have moments of blurred reality? Or is it time we focus?

For my computer class, there might not have been much loss, considering how utterly disinteresting the subject is, but in life, the cost is your time. And the beauty of time is priceless.