Transforming Gold into Lead
by James Souttar
The Lantern: Volume VI, Issue 2 - Article #1
A man stood in 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 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 three-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 six 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, on a violin worth $3.5 million. Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out a theatre in Boston and the seats averaged $100.
Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organised 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 recognise 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?
The original Washington Post story is found at:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
This piece illustrates just how, in everyday life, we jam our intuition with our imagination. When one talks about “imagination”, it is often assumed that it means “making things more than they are”. What the Washington Post’s experiment conclusively demonstrates, though, is that this is not what we do. Nobody imagines that the busker may be a world class violinist – although that, in fact, is exactly what he is. Instead, they bring everything down to size: “This is just my boring commute. This is just a railway station. This guy is just a busker – a low-life. Hey, if I don’t get a move on I’ll be late for work...”
Just, just, just. How many “science” stories does one read where some extraordinary and wonderful phenomenon has been found to be “just” this or that? In fact one could almost say that there is a prejudice behind much of contemporary science to reduce the world to the banal, the commonplace, the small. How many hypotheses start with the assumption that something may be more extraordinary than could be imagined? Very few, I suspect.
And the same is true of our lives: we begin with the assumption that today will not bring something wonderful, something beautiful, something truly mysterious into our lives – but that it will be “same old, same old”.
Not only do we ignore the busker, but we open our newspapers – crammed with the same old predictable “news” – and try our best not to catch our fellow passengers’ eyes. God forbid that we should speak to them; if they do not think we’re crazy for opening our mouths, in all probability they will be crazy themselves. And then we will never get away. Or they will think we are hitting on them. Or, worse, that we are going to try to convince them that Jesus saves. In any case, their lives are sure to be as grey and dull as our own. Or are they?
A young Hungarian friend was doing a PhD in Economics at the University of London, and working as a waiter in an Italian restaurant in the evenings. But the thing about Zoltan was that he had never learnt to play by the “rules” that the rest of us learn – and that bind us in prisons for the rest of our lives. He could strike up a conversation with anyone – literally anyone – anywhere. And while his innocence, his clowning, his ability to listen and inability to stick to any kind of “script” made him very successful in winning the attentions of attractive young women, he was the kind of person who would start talking to the mad old bag lady outside the station.
He lived in the same world as me, but his world was endlessly colourful and interesting: populated by a galaxy of odd, eccentric or merely different people, each with qualities and stories and experiences I could never have expected. These were the same people I would brush past every day, squeeze on to the bus with, barely notice in my fixation on what was “important”.
How I wish I could have been like him.
The greatest lesson of life, I come to realise, is that the things we seek are, in fact, brought to our doorstep every single day. But we ignore them because they do not look, or sound, or behave the way we expect them to. And our choice to ignore them is respected, because the only truly free will we have is where we put our attention.
So these “visitors” depart, barely noticed. And others come, and others too ... and the treatment they receive is the same. Because while, as children, we may have a measure of natural curiosity and engagement with the world, as we get older we become more and more fixed, more and more narrow, in our view of ourselves and the world.
• This piece is extracted, with permission, from James’ extremely interesting network site that can be found here:
http://hiddenrecess.ning.com/about
