Bokeh

During a recent Art Studio visit, I stood mesmerized by a butterfly painting.  I was taking in the crisp butterfly and delicate flower details when the artist, Patrick Miller, sidled alongside me.  I commented that I loved the way the butterfly and flower stand out against the muted, blurred background.  Patrick, being a man of few yet powerful words just said Bokeh.

Bokeh?  A new word for me.  Patrick, sensing my cluelessness, added, “is the blurred out-of-focus portion of a photograph or painting.”  Ahhh.

My question – can you FOCUS without BOKEH?

I recently had the experience of test driving the autonomous driving feature of a Tesla Model 3. A crazy sensation, for me anyway, being a person who doesn’t relinquish control easily.  While driving, the display shows your car’s position in traffic along with the traffic around you.  The display adds orange cones as it senses potential hazards – a tailgating car, a car too close to the lane dividing stripe.  I can visualize the “self-driving” algorithm now in graphical form. My take-away:  while it was driving on a VERY busy 6 lane highway, the algorithm was only mapping 3 lanes:  my lane and the 2 adjacent lanes.  Genius.  The algorithm isn’t DISTRACTED by what is uncontrollable and irrelevant for the task but FOCUSED on what is controllable and relevant!   The non-adjacent lanes were Bokeh to the algorithm. 

Gut-check time – in times of stress and anxiety, am I distracted by the uncontrollable OR focused on things I can control?  Hmmm.