Hikes and Bites: Yosemite National Park

Fear #3: It takes too much time to be specific.

Things happen quickly, and in a desire to keep up, we look for every place we can trim time out of our processes. Sadly, too much of this trimming takes place at the beginning of the process: rushing through researching, planning, and choosing resources in order to just start doingsomething.

But often this results in a “messy middle,” where there is a great deal of extra communication and production waste. When we haven’t made our vision clear, a thousand questions come up later. We know it’s better to “do it right the first time,” which in this case means articulating our vision once very well. However, we often procrastinate or miss opportunities to do so.

There seem to be two different streams within our brain’s rear visual cortex. The first, the ventral stream, assesses objects. It’s the “what” function, and tells you, if you are on a tennis court, that this is a ball barrelling towards you. The second, the dorsal stream, assesses the position and movement of the ball, the “where” function.

As the young Syrian and I played, both of these streams were working, but his will have been tested in a far more serious way than mine. His visual encounter with Europe will have been unfamiliar. Embedded within the panorama before his eyes, there will have been people who wanted to cause him harm, or verbally abuse him. Tired but adrenalised and therefore in fight-or-flight mode, he will have been doing ventral and dorsal visual scans of his immediate environment, looking out for oncomers, or faces that are unwelcoming or aggressive.