Filters

                In high school, my art teacher had many sayings that were repeated so often that anyone in the class could say them back to you.  “Don’t be afraid of the dark” and, “Whose dogma did I run over with my karma” were two of those phrases.  Another was “Draw what you see, not what you think you see.”  It’s that last phrase that got me thinking.  By nature, people are limited.  It’s impossible for us to devote our full attention to more than one thing at any given moment, and there’s only so much that we can handle at once.  This limitation makes it necessary for us to prioritize.  We pick what’s most important and filter the rest of it out. 

                In psychology, we learned that this filtering and our perceptions of our environment is part of what makes us who we are.  Our environment helps to shape us, but because we can only focus on so much of it, we choose what parts of it will shape us.  In art, the filtering is usually a bad thing.  When my teacher told us to draw what we see, she was warning us against the common mistake of drawing what we think might be in front of us, rather than what is really there.  When you start to see what you want to, you lose the accuracy of the drawing.  In life, that filtering can also be good or bad.  Some people use it to filter out any good experiences.  They exaggerate the bad until it crowds out the positive parts.  That can also be flipped so that we are more aware of the good things.  The positive environment that we see can then help shape us to be more positive, happy people.