Information – we listen and filter, we read and filter. Processing data and information to discard what we don’t want and keep what is relevant.

Watch animals – they filter what they eat. Plant eaters don’t eat poisonous berries. They know by smell, taste and instinct what to eat.   Prey driven animals stalking their prey – they focus on the relevant with instinctive reflexes attuned to danger, they retain focus. They are filtering by sight, smell, sound and their sixth senses.

See a school child or could it be you in that boring meeting of an earlier blog – tuned out mind thinking of anything but the lesson or the meeting that is boring. Yet if your name is mentioned then the sixth sense kicks you into alert mode. There is filtering going on, all the time. You or the child in an engaging lesson or meeting will be filtering out the distractions and focusing on either the meeting or lesson or ignoring it – the choice is ignoring the extraneous noises and movements. Attention and focus enable filtering. This ability to filter can be learnt.

 This ability to filter may be inherent, it can also be learnt by arduous study. Animals teach their offspring the skills of survival at play and in the hunt and chase. Play fighting, play biting, play stalking, play hiding, mouthing, touching, smelling – until they are old enough to witness the hunt of small prey or berries and increasingly larger prey as they gain skills. All the time they are learning to tune their senses to filter information.

Time for a coffee?

Filtered my dear or do you prefer processed, run-of-the-mill cheap as chips imitation coffee that is virtually undrinkable, tasteless? With or without chemicals? Ethically grown and harvested beans? Fresh filtered water or water from the toilet bowl? Nice mug that was cleaned using filtered fresh water or one that hasn’t been properly cleaned, just rinsed in the bowl of a thousand uncleaned uses. Guess you do care about filtering.

Time for a holiday in the sun – oh yes, yes, yes, please – can we go? Next week?

Remember the sun screen. It filters out the harmful Rays – no not your drinking mate Ray, no not the sting ray. The sun rays that are harmful. What to buy – ice cream, mayonnaise, yogurt, jelly, sun cream – cheapest, own brand, recognised brand, any old stuff that’s lying around? Guess you could cover yourself in mud. No. Go for the product that filters the harmful rays and remember the sunglasses to protect your eyes, as it’s not nice to have a great holiday and blind yourself because you forgot. Filtering the sun from doing harm.

Need a glass of water?

A good many of us drink water. Many prefer bottled to tap. Fewer have a favourite brand of bottled. Fewer still have a favourite brand of filter. It may depend on your income group and where you live and the quality that comes from the tap or it might be snob, or inverted snob, values. Whichever it is, either tap or out of the bottle, it’s all filtered to enhance the quality and taste.

Enough examples of filtering??

Now the big one. Air. Breathing air. By now we all know its importance to health, of course you do if you’re reading this blog.

Estate agents and car sales staff will tell you that presenting a clean house, flat, car will help the sale. First impressions count and they stick. The first impression is the entrance and the greeting. What do you see? Take a shop, a store, an office, a train – anywhere you go into.

Look around – up and down and roundabout. Is the greeting inviting or do you have to tip toe – not through the tulips but through the debris? Do you have to avoid dirt on the floor on surfaces or in the air? Do you wish you wore wellies, a mask, gloves or that you just don’t want to go inside? The clues will be there for all to see.

Filter that information and decide if you are going to risk your well-being. No good buying health products in a dirty store.

Most stores have air conditioning – look at where the air is coming out. Are the grilles dirty or sparkly clean? Dirty on the outside means the store is not cleaning the grilles and more importantly they are not filtering the dirty air or not changing / cleaning dirty filters. It may be your favourite place to visit but do take care if its damaging your lungs with dirty air, look around the entrance, look at those air grilles. If they are dirty make some noise at the information desk.

We are being encouraged to use masks and sanitiser. The stores have to be encouraged to blow clean filtered fresh air into the spaces you enter. And to prove they’re doing it. It is easy for them to forget and easy for them to do.

See you later if the air is clean.