"Silience"

I’ve been reading John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. I think it may come to be one of my favorite and most-revisited books of all time. It has given me a new lexicon for life, which has somehow been a balm for the soul; a reminder that my complicated emotions are not unique to me and that we – humanity – are all in this thing together, holding on for dear life as best we can.

The entry I came across today was Silience, which Koenig defines as “the brilliant artistry hidden all around you.” He discusses the idea of encountering the work of a great artist before they are discovered but walking past without noticing the brilliance of their contribution. And goes into how much of our lives we spend hyperfocused on our next thing, indifferent to the beauty of our surroundings.

But my attention snagged on his assertion that “indifference is easy,” citing both the experiment that virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell did in 2007 when he tried busking for an hour on his Stradivarius, collecting a grand total of $32 from the seven people who actually stopped to pay attention and Gene Weingarten’s commentary in the Washington Post that “every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.”

At 40 years old, I’m still that child. I still have the urge to stop and take in the music, the garden, the architecture, the cloudscapes. And I’m also that parent, urging myself onward. Indifference, for me, is still a discipline. Something I can fake because I’m expected to because I’m an adult with places to be and bills to pay. And the clock is ticking.

And I wonder if maybe indifference isn’t that easy for most people.

Maybe indifference was slowly beaten into us over years of being told that art isn’t important until the right people notice it. That pleasure should only be found in specific, secret places when we can manage to carve out twenty minutes from our schedule. That stopping to smell the roses—literal or proverbial—is a grotesque example of excessive sentimentality.

And so we all learned to quash the urge. To lower our gaze and walk a bit faster past the people who dare to settle on a street corner and bring a little music into a gray world, whether folks acknowledge it or not. We have to look away because if we had the courage to really see them, we might find in them a reflection of the dreams we gave up on in pursuit of a more “practical” path. Even if we try to reassure ourselves that we're better off with the success we've settled for.

Or maybe I’m just weird and never grew up.

But still, I’d like to think I’d have been one of the 7 people who took the time to stop, even for a moment, and appreciate an artist sharing his craft. I'd like to think that I would have taken that moment of opening myself to beauty and carried it with me, noticing how the breeze felt on my face as I walked away, appreciating the joyful sound of laughter from a stranger in the crowd, the brutal-but-innocent honesty of a young child telling a story of his home and the parents' embarrassment at having a piece of their raw humanness revealed publicly. I'd like to think that I could find beauty in anything if I commit to doing so.

In truth, much more often I get lost in thought, in a to-do list, in fantasies of what life could be like "if only..." and I forget to notice. And then I come back to a book or a meme or a poem on social media and I remember my commitment a little while longer the next time. Until it fades again.

And maybe that cycle of forgetting and remembering is just as beautiful as anything else, once I notice it.