Aware.

Ari Weinzweig on peripheral vision ...

Peripherality—where we touch on something but don’t quite yet understand it or decide to focus on it—allows information to enter our minds and stay there, sitting quietly in some back corner, until one day, seemingly out of the blue, it suddenly shows up on center stage. What was first perceived as peripheral, Bateson suggests, often turns out to have been far more important than we might have realized. It’s certainly true in this case. Peripheral vision is hardly new news to me. I probably first learned about it as a subject of study in sixth grade. And yet now, nearly 60 years later, in the spirit of spiral learning, here I am circling back to the subject. 

In fact, Bateson says, peripheral vision is essential to our collective health. It allows us, as writer Maurice Telleen once said, to “understand more than we know,” to be wary and gently aware without being distracted from our main point of focus. As Telleen tells us, peripheral vision can allow things to enter our minds in a way that, unconsciously, almost comes across as some kind of intellectual and cultural “osmosis.”