Thinking for Ourselves

In January 2007, a young man played six Bach pieces on the violin for 45 minutes in a Washington D.C. subway. Over a thousand people passed by, with mostly only children trying to stop and listen before their parents dragged them away. Only 27 people stopped to give money (he collected $32) as they went by.

The violinist was Joshua Bell, playing some of the most complex pieces for the violin on a $3.5 million Stradivarius. Three days earlier, he had played to a full house at the Boston Symphony Hall, where tickets averaged over $100.

The subway event had been arranged by The Washington Post "as an experiment in context, perception and priorities - as well as unblinking assessment of public taste: in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

Marketeers have long known that people designate one of two identical products to be better than the other if the packaging is more attractive. In the case of Bell, the 'packaging' was unattractive so people could not hear the value.

What does this mean for our own lives? How much do we dismiss what we hear or see because the appearance is not to our taste? When practicing for a presentation, we are told that appearance is about 80%, and content less than 10%. In this age of information overload, how do we select what is valuable to us from the constant stream to which we are subjected? We flit from one item to another, one media source to another, hardly stopping to consider if what we read or hear is valuable or not.

We are told that sports people, singers, politicians, and actors are important, never hearing about scientists, engineers, doctors and business people who make a real difference to the lives of people because media has determined them to be 'unattractive' in some way.

We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see, the result being that we do not hear or see much that is new, or potentially transformative. Spiritual practices, which offer real ways to change our limited perceptions, are seen as being boring, hard work, or taking too long to create meaningful change.

And so, a lot of the time, we walk past and do not hear the music that is all around us.