“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”
– John Berger
The average human blinks between 15 and 20 times each minute. Each blink lasts around 300 milliseconds, which means you spend almost one-tenth of your waking hours in darkness. And yet, if you were asked what you saw in those moments, you would likely insist: “Everything.”
Your mind edits these lapses into a seamless narrative. Like a skilled film editor, it stitches frames together so that the gaps vanish. The ‘you’ that is watching the world is, in truth, watching a story created after the fact – an internal reconstruction, not a raw feed from reality.
This is one of the first humbling lessons of observation: you are never seeing ‘everything’ – your eyes are not cameras; they are gatekeepers. They pass along fragments. The mind then fills in the rest.
That we live our lives missing so much is not a failure of biology – it is its design. Constant awareness of every detail would overwhelm us; we would drown in the noise. Blinking, literal and metaphorical, allows us to focus on what matters. But it comes at a cost.
Knowing this, we might approach the act of seeing with more humility. We might acknowledge that what we observe is partial, stitched, edited. And if we can admit that we are all unreliable witnesses – even to our own lives – we might become more careful with the conclusions we draw from what we think we have seen.
