Perceiving Beauty
Joshua Bell
A man sat at a Metro station in Washington, DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule.
A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk. A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.
The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.
In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money, but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.
Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context? One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: if we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?
Note: Original source of text is unknown. I received this through the email. The original Washington Post article from April 2007 is here. Below is a YouTube video excerpt and a link to the full audio of the performance is here.
Work is love made visible
I’ve read quite a few passages on discovering your authentic work, or what some would refer to as a “calling”. Most recently, I completed a book by Jonathan Haidt named The Happiness Hypothesis in which he quotes Kahlil Gibran in a chapter about Love & Work and how it is linked to a calling or what Jung referred to as vocation.
But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born.
And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life. … And when you work with love you bind yourself to yourself, and to one another, and to God. … And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. … It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit.
Work is love made visible.
–Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
I’ve actually added a few more lines than what Haidt did to give a little more flavor of Gibran’s thrust.
Haidt also compares work to lost craftsmanship, which I think is the primary point he is working with. However, what stood out for me was the additional move Gibran makes in linking work with the beloved. It occurred to me that perhaps many people are not able to find or fulfill themselves in a true vocation, not because they are unable to find work that connects with their talents and passion, but because they have no experience with connecting with a beloved. In other words, without knowledge of the underlying experience of the divine love to measure the worth and purpose of our work, how do we know we are pursuing our life’s calling?
I worry that we focus our energies on finding the perfect fit (i.e., finding our beloved) in our work when the reality in my experience is that the love or the work or the calling often finds us without our conscious intention. This I believe is the truth that Gibran is trying to convey when he calls our work the fulfillment of “earth’s furthest dream.” In other words, it is not OUR calling that we seek when we look for our true vocation–that view is a reflection of our egomeniacal need to have the universe revolve around our own desires. Instead, what Gibran I think is saying is that it is the earth’s dream calling to us to play our part in its fulfillment and in so doing bind ourselves to our Self and thus to our beloved. What this means is that we do not need to make the effort to search for the perfect connection to work, we only need respond when we are finally called by the work that will ultimately find us. There is, I believe, a huge difference in the world view based on seeking and one that is based on responding. By leaving out the line, “But I say to you that when you work you fulfill a part of earth’s furthest dream, assigned to you when that dream was born” the meaning of what follows shifts from transpersonal to personal and the term beloved takes on a corporeal meaning (i.e., lover) instead of something that is divine (i.e., god, nature, Gaia, etc.). We must pursue the lover and his/her love whereas we are always already one with the divine. Read in the context of a calling, we could say that vocation (just the same as love) is inherently imminent in work of any kind, not just in work of our own choosing.
Often when people talk of god, or god’s plan, they may also cling to the idea that they can force fit their own free will (ego) to a web of intelligence that by definition they are unable to conceive or comprehend. This is not to say that the two concepts are mutually exclusive, it’s just that they tend to contradict in terms of our beliefs in either divine craftsmanship of reality or subjective destiny both of which can potentially have profound impact on our overall world view as well. How can we presume to understand our fit in the divine web from the pinpoint of a single vocation? Or, how can we presume that our vocation actually serves a greater whole–especially one that is beyond our comprehension? The best we can possibly do is use our thermometer of happiness to measure our relative success and hope that, in the end, our work does some good somewhere at some time. Otherwise, our vocation runs the risk of being an exercise in the ego feeding its own needs rather than a calling.
Purposeful education
NBC Nightly News recently ran a short piece on students performing assignments where they were asked to engage with a current social issue. Combined with other educational like Project Based Learning (PBL), it is possible that we are seeing a move in the way that people (at least teachers and administrators) view education and curricular effectiveness.I find it curious that we should be surprised that children engage more in their education when we treat them more like adult learners (especially junior high and high school students) where learning opportunities take on more of an immediacy, are embedded in a broader perspective, and can directly lead to practical application.
Rather than go into specific detail here about how education is starting to reflect more of a 21st century model of knowledge and learning, I’ll just pass on the the video below as a means of priming the pump. As you view the clip, keep in mind that these students are engaged in tacit learning exercises where they are focused more on the acquisition, management, and synthesis of information rather than the retention and assessment of it. More on this later.
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The Third Age by James Brown
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616) Macbeth, V.v.19-28 (Macbeth)
William Shakespeare in his play As You Like It ( II.vii.139-166) enumerates the ages of man as being seven. In American culture, we rarely seem to look at our own lives as consisting of more than the two states of childhood and then adult. For myself, and I am sure for many like me, there is a distinct experience of life as being in three discrete stages of which I personally am venturing into the third. James Hollis (1993) refers to this transition point into the third age of life as the “middle passage” which at its heart is an invitation for us to become fully conscious human beings on our inevitable and unceasing trek to our death—which is perhaps our fourth and final stage of life or as Freud (1961) wrote, the aim of life. The middle passage is a time in which we reassess our acquired sense of self, reformulate our life questions, unveil the hidden (shadow) parts of ourselves, and redirect our energies toward connecting less with material sources of power—like time and money—with which we find little comfort in the unstoppable decline of the former or the acute vicissitude of the later. In American culture, this important life transition is often referred to as the mid-life crisis which carries with it copious negative connotations ranging from regression into infantile gratifications to a nihilistic future outlook based on the myth of decline in our later years of life which Shakespeare ( As You Like It, II.vii.139-166) paints in classic Western style as a “second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Since we came into the world “ mewling and puking in the nurse’s arm,” it must have seemed to Shakespeare both ironic and poetic that we would somehow be characterized as leaving the world in the same manner. Unfortunately, this Western prejudice toward aging and the aged has marginalized a critical progression point in our lives and to a similar extent that part of our social structure that brings the element of eldership and wisdom that we so desperately need in our world at this very moment. Read the rest of this post »
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