Forgive me. Today I would like to post about a personal topic. It has to do with light, signals, filters, and noise.

Light is the medium by which we see the world with its tapestry of vibrant colors, rich textures, soft curves, and jagged edges. Light is the agent that transmits our world's most stunning signals.

When there is excessive light, however, richness is obscured. Have you ever tried to look past a spotlight shining in your eyes? You can’t see much. We instinctively use filters to remove extraneous information, which is sometimes called noise. Too much noise is why we use tinted goggles when skiing on a sunny day or polarized glasses to fish a river. Light-filtering optics make these activities much easier and fun.

When we tune a radio, or a photographer adjusts her camera’s settings, we are filtering out noise in search of the perfect signal. Filters help us manage the ever-delicate signal to noise ratio, whether our signals are transmitted by light, conveyed by sonar waves through the ocean, via information encoded in high frequency waves transmitted to our smartphones, or through the barrage of information coming at us in our work and daily lives.

If we overuse our filters, however, reality can become distorted as we often unknowingly collect and use filters, much like barnacles clinging under a boat’s waterline.  

In thinking about these phenomena, I am beginning to see how undetected filters sometimes negatively impact my relationships. As a result of prior encounters, sometimes poor, I install restrictive filters. I start by opening my filters to a person’s bad characteristics while simultaneously restricting the light that carries their good qualities.

Then something sinister happens. Because I am only receiving negative signals, I begin to see this person as broken, capable of sending only distorted signals. Just like I might conclude a radio is broken if I can only hear static.

The irony, however, is that I am a key reason there is static in my relationships. My undetected filters are part of the problem. I am helping to distort reality.

And just because I can only hear static does not change the undeniable reality that amazing music, metaphorically speaking, is out there being transmitted over the airwaves. Beautiful harmonies are there; they have been there the whole time.

What happens, then, if I cast aside my filters and consider all the light that is there – all the light I was unable, or unwilling, to see. Then, like tired passengers waiting to board an airplane, all the numerous good signals coming from a person start cramming their way into my reality.

Lately, with one of my relationships, I keep asking myself this key question: What is all the light I cannot see? This question comes from the title of one of my very favorite books, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Doerr’s book is a masterpiece, and I am only now seeing additional layers in its title.

So, my commitment is this. Before I assume there are only negative signals to be absorbed, I am going to ask myself this very important question: Am I seeing all this person's light?