Falling in Love with a Blurred World
Like a child, imagine the world — fall in love with its blur.
I've always been drawn to things with a hint of mysticism. Not strictly religious mysticism, but all those things you half-understand, can almost-but-not-quite see clearly.
For instance, people often say that when a nearsighted person walks down the street, everyone looks attractive. As a nearsighted person myself, I can confirm this is absolutely true.
Photography enthusiasts, during their gear-obsession phase, tend to blindly pursue lenses with large apertures. A major reason is that larger apertures produce shallower depth of field — in plain language, more dramatic background blur.
From these examples, most people clearly accept the idea that distance creates beauty.
Distance creates blur, and blur creates beauty. But step outside the physical realm and extend this to thought and understanding — many people can no longer accept this logic.
You often hear people say they can't understand a painting or can't follow a film. In those moments, the blur in comprehension causes the whole world to go out of focus. Unlike the beauty that comes from physical blur, this kind of defocusing makes some people anxious.
But me — I'm often deeply captivated by this blurred world.
Like in the animated film Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, where after a flu epidemic passes, everyone falls in love. Or in the novel The Baron in the Trees, where after a minor argument with his father, the protagonist climbs a tree and decides never to come down again. Or in Munch's The Scream, those abstract lines that form the composition.
I love all of these beyond words.
But there are also situations that leave me confused. When studying English, facing a screen full of incomprehensible Latin letter combinations, I simply cannot muster any interest. This is directly why, after studying English for over a decade, the only word I'm confident about is "abandon."
In language learning, there's a common saying that children learn languages faster than adults. Beyond children's stronger memory, when I think back to my own childhood, I was learning many things without fully understanding them — and I wasn't afraid. Back then, I didn't care whether I fully understood something; I just responded to whatever part I could grasp.
I wonder if my insistence on fully understanding everything — refusing to move on to the next English sentence until I've completely parsed the current one — is exactly what's been holding me back.
So I tried a different approach: reading simple English-language books directly, understanding as much as I could, not worrying about the parts I didn't quite get — just saying hello to unfamiliar words.
I opened The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. From the first chapter, I only half-understood it. My interpretation was that in their basement, you could see everyone's mood — happy people were colorful, and unhappy people were gray.
Later, I realized the book's setting was nothing like that. But I thought my version was actually a pretty interesting concept. And so I discovered that this kind of blurry, uncertain understanding might actually be the wellspring of imagination and creativity.
Blur and uncertainty provoke thought — they make you imagine what those missing, unclear parts might be. The more imagination you have, the more possibilities exist.
This might also explain why children's imagination and creativity far exceed adults'. As we grow and gain the ability to see things clearly, we begin refusing to engage with anything we can't see clearly. All our possibilities get confined to the field of view right in front of us.
This might also be why so many adults find life boring — because these blurry, possibility-filled things are where the fun lives.
I hope I can embrace more ambiguity and fall more deeply in love with this out-of-focus world. Like a child, I want to imagine more of what the world could be.