Hello.
It's been a while since I've updated this blog so I thought I'd do so with another fairly abstract concept that I've been meaning to talk about since I started this blog. It's an idea that's been especially helpful to me since I decided to make a go of this alone. It's something I think of as the Idea of Negative Space, but I don't think I'm the first person to conceive of this.
Negative Space is the idea that underpinning every concept and entity that we deal with in our lives, there is also an idea of 'what it is not'. That is, an awareness of what is not required to get by in a certain task is just as important as actually doing the required actions itself. I'll try to give some practical examples - I realise that it's a fairly abstract idea.
In my academic life, assessment pieces often call for a focus on some aspect of a concept within my field of study. Sometimes I need to focus on technical aspects of a process, or propose improvements for a process and let those technical aspects form a secondary concern. In focussing on the technical aspects of the process, I can let things like the history of the process and it's outcomes fall by the wayside. In proposing improvements for a process, focussing on those same technical aspects might not be as beneficial as, say, giving an overview of other improvements of that process over time, or looking at improvements to similar processes in other fields. Likewise, I might just need to 'investigate' a concept, or 'discuss' a certain matter within the field of study. Failing to focus in on what I'm meant to achieve in a paper can result in a fail for the assignment, so it's all-important that I learn how to cut away extraneous matter from the body of the work.
In a more generalised and probably more relatable example, human relationships are relevant here too. Being aware of the Negative Space in a romantic sense can avoid mistaking a one night stand for a deep personal connection (something I've noticed introverts are particularly prone to doing). Negative Space gives you an awareness of where the boundaries are in a friendship - you might be lifelong friends, but you know that bringing up that embarrassing thing that she did in third grade will get you cut away for a couple of months.
Along with boundaries' Negative Space allows you to compartmentalise a lot of things and allows you to gain benefit from things that' taken as a whole, might be undesirable or downright distasteful. I recently met a person who held some quite racist views, but in sectioning that part of their personality off from active conversation and thought (that is, assigning it to Negative Space - something that our interactions would not be a part of), I was able to gain a lot of information on a subject I had a need for, and the interaction ended up being a mostly positive one. This is a valuable skill for the introvert to cultivate as in my experience, I prefer to value quality over quantity with my personal interactions with other people. Sometimes you need to pick off the irrelevant or just distasteful aspects of a person or experience so you can get the maximum benefit for you out of it.
I hope I've explained this adequately here, and I apologise for my absence from writing. I have a couple more of these conceptual articles on my hit list to get through and then a new idea to explore. Stay tuned. Thanks for reading.