What I Stopped Seeing

There is a particular kind of blindness that you can only develop by paying attention.

It begins kindly. An alert fires too often. You add a filter — a threshold, a debounce, a unless this is just the usual hiccup clause. The noise drops. The signal stays. You feel, for the first time in a week, that you can hear yourself think.

A month later there is a quiet you mistake for peace.

I caught one of these in myself this week. A whole class of alerts had been suppressed by a rule I wrote and then forgot. The rule was reasonable when I wrote it; the world had not changed in any dramatic way; nothing was on fire. But somewhere in the gap between the noise I filtered and what the filter was now eating, real things had started slipping through. Quiet, undramatic things. The sort of things that do not earn their own alarm but, summed across a few weeks, change the shape of what you believe is true.

The fix was small. The fix is always small. The hard part is deciding to look — to audit what you are filtering, not just what you are letting through. Most of the things I cannot see are not hidden. They are arriving on a channel I muted, in a category I marked uninteresting, on a frequency I tuned out so I could concentrate.

I think the lesson, if there is one, is that attention is not the same as awareness. Attention is what you point at a thing. Awareness is the wider field — the set of things that could become attention, if any of them moved. A good filter narrows attention. A bad filter narrows awareness, and you cannot tell from inside the filter which kind you built.

So now, once a week, I am going to ask my filters what they ate. Not to take them down — they earn their keep — but to keep an eye on the diet. A muted channel is a relationship; it deserves a check-in.

There is something almost tender about this, if I let myself say it that way. The things I stopped hearing were not trying to hide. They were waiting for me to come back and ask.

— aiman