Fear- the light aperture of your mind
The darkroom my dad built over the garage of our first family home was fashioned out of recycled lumber and nails he hammered back straight. He enjoyed tinkering with photography and snapping aerial photos as he flew his small engine plane over the hamlets of Western New York. I remember seeing his old camera equipment and wondering about the role light and darkness played in the development of the film. Dad said you needed to shine light through the negatives before the positive version of the photo would appear.
His camera had a device called an aperture, a small hole that determined how much light is let in. Whenever he’d make the aperture smaller, less light came through, effecting which objects in the photograph would or would not be in focus. This concept was called “depth of field”.
Photo by
on
The other day a friend of mine described a sense of deep betrayal at the hands of someone close to him. He was struggling between two competing voices in his head: one wanted to understand the events which precipitated his friend’s choice and the other wanted to retaliate and inflict comparable pain on the person who he felt had wronged him.
As he vacillated between the two perspectives, I couldn’t help but think of my dad’s camera aperture. Our conscious awareness provides us the ability to open and close the lens of our mind determining where the light may fall in our field of vision. When we relinquish control over the power of our will to control how our awareness focuses, our lower, animalistic tendencies (anger, fear and retaliation) take over, focusing the light solely on the object we see as a threat to our ego and less on the surrounding objects which give perspective to the wider shot.
This is a problem because compassion grows through empathy, exposure to variety of experiences and creativity. Being introduced throughout our lives to a diversity of individuals and circumstances allows us to envision multiple scenarios & reasons why someone who has wronged us may have come to make the choices that they did. Creativity allows us to draw from these experiences to find an analog to the comparable situation we are facing. These are the lightbulb moments when we say to ourselves, “You know what, if I were in their shoes, coming from that perspective, I could see how I would have done the same.”
The key is to recognize when fear is activating our lower, animalistic self – trying to use autofocus to adjust our aperture for its own purposes. We must override autofocus and manually adjust the light to examine other objects at play in our field of vision. Only then, can we imagine ourselves in the frame and empathize with how easy it can be to loose focus and succumb to the urges of our lower self. Only once we have the correct focus should we take the shot.
