Normally I'd ask do you notice how we tend to overlook so many things in our lives, but that's kind of the whole point of this topic. We don't notice them anymore. All too often it seems as though the majority of the things in our life fall to the background, almost as though they've been painted in to give the illusion of substance. It's not exactly taking them for granted, but we may to fail to see them. How often do you really look at the things within your life? If we're not paying attention to what's around us, then what are we paying attention to?
When I say things in our lives, it can really mean a bunch of different aspects. The first one is the most obvious one, the stuff we collect as we travel through life. This could be furniture, cars, gadgets, or even houses. It's the accumulation of things that surround us. Even if you're something of a minimalist, you will gather up various things throughout your life. In a lot of cases those things aren't in the forefront of our perception of life. They're largely ignored once we have them. If you don't believe me, think about all the stuff you own. Then think about the last time you even touched everything you own. You know it's there and maybe there is a bit of comfort knowing that even if you don't touch it, you know it's there when you want it. As the saying goes "you don't know what you've got until it's gone" it's only when something is removed that you realize the hole it may leave. Sometimes we behave like a child and only want something because it's gone. Prior to that we may have just assumed it was there whenever we wanted it. Maybe that's just our idea of what comes with ownership. It's ours to do with what we want, even if we want to do nothing with it.
A larger problem is when we do the same thing with the people in our life. Now not everyone you know is going to be the focus of your attention all the time. It's just not realistic. Still there are probably people in your life that you assume will be there regardless of if you talk to them. They're doing their thing and you're doing yours. By that logic then it's very likely you yourself are in the background of someone else. People often wonder how they drifted apart from someone they were once close to. There could be a lot of circumstances for that, but it really comes down to allowing them to fall out of focus, where eventually we start to overlook their presence at all. It's not always a bad thing though. Sometimes in life people just go down different paths and those roads don't have the same destination.
It brings up the question of if something is in the background does that make it less important to us? Now I'm not saying you need to be hyper-aware of your surroundings or the people in your life, but it's interesting just how much of our life blurs into the background. It's very similar to how most of our life is in the past. We seem to be aware of only a fraction of the entire picture that makes up our life.
