Take a moment, close your eyes, and paint a picture in your mind. It’s 2007, you’re in Washington DC on a chilly morning in January, in a Metro Station. There is no shortage of people. Everyone is anxious to get to work, or to get home from work, or to do whatever else it is that people do. You’re walking and amongst all of the noise you hear the sound of music, a violin to be specific. You slow down as you walk past him, to hear a bit more, but you have a tight schedule to keep so you don’t stay. You don’t think anything of it, and go about with your day, not letting the stranger playing the violin so much as cross your mind again.
The man played for about 45 minutes, and collected around $32 in that time. No one knew just what it was that they were missing. No one was aware that this man was Joshua Bell, who is considered one of the greatest classical musicians in the world. It was a given that no one was aware that the music he was playing was one of the most complicated pieces ever written and that the instrument he was playing on was worth $3.5 million dollars. A few days earlier he had sold out a complete theatre in Boston where seats to see the show sold for about $100 a piece.
Joshua playing incognito in the station was organized by the Washington Post to be included as part of an experiment about perception, taste, and people’s priorities. This experiment can be read in more detail in the original article titled “Pearls Before Breakfast” by Gene Weinstein. One of the questions that arose after the completion of the experiment was this: Do we perceive beauty in a common environment at an inconvenient time? As the article says, “If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?” This really struck a peculiar chord in my mind.
Granted, I have never been to DC, or been in any type of Metro Station when I was visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico with my aunt I spent a considerable amount of time sitting and listening to the street performers. They fascinate me, and I can’t help but put a few dollars in their case if I have it, so I’d like to think that I would have been one of those seven who stopped and admired what he was doing, even if it was only for a few minutes. Though, the article made me wonder: what do we miss?
More often than not we are in such a rush to get places that we ignore many of the things around us and only focus on what is urgent/important to us now. Recently I was watching TV with my family, the show, called Brain Games, was talking all about what we miss in our everyday lives because of how our brains are wired. We are not set up properly to be able to focus on many things at once. As humans, we are not meant to multitask. We often like to think that we are excellent at it but a lot of the time when we “multitask” we aren’t really, we are just switching between two or three tasks in a way that seems convenient. Of course, this takes a good amount of focus, but is in no way “multitasking”. In result, we miss a lot. We tend to dial in on one thing and black out everything around us that doesn’t relate whatever it is that we happen to be focusing on.
In the show it showed it used an example of a card trick. Six cards were put up on the screen and you were told to pick one and memorize it the best you could. It’s a simple task, you’re given a few seconds and then the cards are flipped over and then a few seconds later they are flipped back over. Suddenly you’re amazed at the fact that the card you chose wasn’t there anymore! However, you probably didn’t notice that none of the cards are the same this round. While you were focused on your one card, you didn’t notice that they had all changed. This example may not directly relate to that of the Metro Station on that chilly January morning, but it proves a point nonetheless — people miss things. It just so happens that sometimes those things are incredibly beautiful.
If we can hurry right past something gorgeous and intricate in the metro station without even knowing we missed anything, what else is it that we’re walking past? The world is full of beautiful people making beautiful things. I look forward to the day when, as humans, we become more aware of the gorgeous happenings that surround us. A little more than a thousand people walked through that station on the January morning. Only seven stopped to listen.