There's too many ways to do this, take 30 minutes of Me time for example, jot down a thought, but more important than having a great idea in your head, act on it. Buckminster Fuller, the extraordinary thinker and inventor probably put it best that "merely talking about ideas does not support their advancement or the development of individuals and humanity...the majority of people do nothing about their good ideas except engage in seemingly endless discussions." So instead of envisioning scenes for that screenplay in your Moleskin, get a camera and film a prototype. Walk up to that gallery curator and show her your samples instead of waiting to be discovered. Sign up for that triathalon, even if none of your friends are willing to sacrifice that weekend with you. Take that intro to improv class, even if you run the risk of shitting your pants in a classroom of strangers. All of it will ultimately lead you down the path of acting rather than waiting, which we all need more of. In my case I'm learning to come out of hiding behind the peripheral vision of my D70, speak to and touch, in a completely noncreepy way, my subjects.
Uncovering someplace's authenticity requires a keen eye for not just the exceptionally novel but also the unexceptionally mundane, sharp ears for the drones, buzzes, and trickles, a mind open to the impossible and continuously questioning the acceptable. I don't need to tell you how hard of an exercise this is in our times. It's too easy to travel Asia with the precise scheduling of a guide, or even to trace the same route to work every day without raising your head from the concrete. The idea is to be alert, but in our daily grind, scheduled down to the second, we barely have time for ourselves, let alone notice our surroundings.
I was deeply touched by Gene Weingarten's article for the Washington Post, in which he conducted a fascinating experiment testing people's perceptiveness of beauty displaced in an extraordinary context. He placed Joshua Bell, arguably the world's greatest living violinist, in a busy DC metro station during the morning commute with a $3 million dollar violin and a repertoire of Bach's most revered work. Every one of the 1000 passerbys in the next hour had a choice to make, "Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?" In the 45 minutes that he played, only seven people stopped and took notice of the music, 27 people gave money for a total of $32.17, while thousands rushed past oblivious to having been in the presence of a musician who had just played for the President the night before. Watch the video below.
If even Joshua Bell gets lost in the shuffle, what about all the smaller beautiful things that can enrich us if we only let them? Rhetoric is great but what's important is application when it actually counts. For having read this article, we are the lucky ones, because we are still on that commute. In time my goal is to not just experience the authenticity of exotic travels, but of the raw life breathing around me every day.
I leave for Beijing tomorrow afternoon. The start of another chapter and goodbye to Singapore!
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this is a good one jgao.
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