Background
is not the shy, retiring, you-go-first word it seems to want to be
We are lonely today, not because we are losing contact with other individuals, but because we have lost our friendship with the sky and the moon and the stars that create the canopy beneath which all of our human relationships and friendships flourish and prosper in mutual awe.
Background
is not the shy, retiring, you-go-first word it seems to want to be. Background is underestimated and calls on us to widen our vision and open to a greater breadth of attention.
Foreground dominates our lives, is overestimated in importance and hides the greater context from which it has emerged. The neglect of background is the source of much of our present loneliness and most definitely, our present unhappiness.
Background is always what we start to pay attention to when we start to pay real attention. In Zen practice, one of the signs of deepening states of presence and intimacy with our surrounding reality is the way background stops being background: the way we stop choosing between near and far, past and present, near objects and those that seem to lie over the horizon of our understanding. Background shapes our seeing of a thing as much as the thing itself: the sun around a silhouetted maple actually outlines what we see as the shape of the tree. A tree in our real, grounded, physical apprehension of the world is made of light and its absence, as much as it is made of wood.
Foreground has come to be a kind of obsession in our lives making us unwitting slaves to too many of the things that are placed right in front of our noses: numbers, results, graphs, the blurred screen full of endless messages. We obsess with what individual people seem to be saying to us rather than the vaster sweep of human mythological dynamics that lie behind their speech. Facebook under all its multi-headed disguises of Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads is aptly named: trying as it is to be the first thing we see, everyday, in front of our noses, literally in our faces.
Foreground is where we recognise too late, in the news, most of our problems but also, most of the possibilities that have just slipped through our hands, all of which can only emerge from the greater context behind the news: the living, breathing ever evolving background. Foreground, without background is where we always come to recognise things too late. The ability to pay attention to background from the very beginning grants us a disguised clairvoyance in making it look as if we are able to look into the future. We understand what is about to happen, by looking now at the background, from where all our problems and possibilities first emerge.
Paying attention to background as much as foreground is not only an introduction to our greater surroundings: paying attention to background tells us we are already in a conversation with greater worlds and have been for longer than we know. Bringing background into our life tells us how much we have been defending and fighting against acknowledging everything that has been there all along and has often been travelling faithfully from afar to knock on our door.
Background and backdrop is the ultimate context of community. The birdsong, the wind in the trees, the eyes of the passing stranger trying to catch our eye for a morning hello; and even, and at the end of our walk, the warm hubbub of a coffee shop filled with waking voices. Background is our substrate of belonging, a shared communal background is our first remedy for loneliness.
We have grown and evolved over the millennia with the green of grass and leaves to find every shade of that colour soothing and inviting, and with the wind ruffling the blades, to find refreshment: with the blue of the sky to find it scintillating, and with the spaciousness it creates in our minds, literally up-lifting. We are lonely today, not because we are losing contact with other individuals, but because we have lost our friendship with the sky and the moon and the stars that create the canopy beneath which all of our human relationships and friendships flourish and prosper in mutual awe.
Direct contact with another foreground face and constant contact with all the foreground explanations we conspire to make together, is only a temporary cure for loneliness, often leading to disappointment in the specifics of a too predictable story and a too familiar life. To share the breezy morning sky by the broad Atlantic with a passing stranger or live music when crammed into a pub full of unknown but foot-tapping fellow listeners is another form of closeness, one sustained by a friendship with the wider world rather than making foreground relationships and foreground naming bear all the weight. Background is strangely a doorway to a close up intimacy, one that does not need the burden of asking of the relationship - ‘What now?’
We share a sky, the sound of the rain, the appreciation of music with almost all our fellow human beings. The shared, greater context of our surrounding life is what grants the real possibility of deep friendship to our foreground friends. Even prisoners who rarely see the sky but who share a proper sympathetic understanding of their enclosed background, and their curtailed background lives, are given, through their prison walls, the possible intimacies of friendship.
Background is half of what we see and hear; background is half of what we do not see and hear. Background is our visible and invisible helpmate, waiting for us to raise our heads to look and see. Background is the constellation of swirling forces out of which our life emerges, and background holds our future, the horizon in our life that always draws us on; a life that can find true definition only through what always lies beyond it.
Background is a seemingly boring word, but the actual experience of what lies beyond our immediate sight, is a gifted treasure house for all of our human senses. The bird song, the distant horn in the harbour, a dog barking at twilight. The wind stirring the branches of a swaying tree. Sitting in many a zen retreat, through hour after hour of silence, the moment of opening up, of widening intimacy, has always been marked for me, by a sense of the wider tidal world coming to find me. A sense that I am leaving at last, the narrow, familiar priorities that I was, until that moment, habituated and almost repeatedly forcing myself to recognise and name. DW
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