Friday, March 15, 2013

How I Almost Broke Olive Garden


Yesterday I went to the Olive Garden, and having been thinking a lot about art lately, I was admiring the interior sculpture and decorations in the building while the friend I came with, had run to the bathroom. I specifically noted the lion heads carved in relief, peering out of the walls from above the columns framing the lobby. I wondered to myself while I waited “are they plaster, or are they something else?” I didn’t know if anyone who worked there would have any answers, but I figured I would give it a shot.
I leaned over from my spot waiting on the bench, and I told one of the employees standing behind the pulpit-like reception area that I had an odd question for him, and proceeded to ask my question. He craned his head backwards, and looked up… and it seemed as if he had never looked up before. He soon agreed with me that they probably were plaster, but I noticed he couldn’t stop looking up after that. Other employees noticed, and soon they were looking up as well.
A small mob of people then gathered, all remarking on how they had never noticed the lion heads…or the other little decorations throughout the building. One woman was absolutely giddy as she realized that there were elegant lion head decorations in varying sizes throughout the reception area and into the dining area. It was as if I had suddenly turned a restaurant into an art gallery with a simple question.
There was a time I would have been afraid to ask a question so completely outside of that employees role…mainly out of fear of being seen as stupid for asking for some reason.  Over the past year, I’ve been gaining a great deal more confidence and nonchalance- I’ve got no real reason to care about what other people might think about my eccentricies, its better to just be myself and speak my mind (usually anyway, sometimes my mind is a VERY politically incorrect sort of place)
I wonder what would have happened if it had actually been busy at that point. Would I have broken their system? Would they have been so busy looking up like children seeing the sky for the first time, that their duties would have been forgotten? They were so suddenly lost in their own world when something was introduced to them that made them wonder about something, that made them see an extra dimension to the place they worked that they never noticed before. For a moment, they were individuals, laughing and smiling, and trading jokes, and not cogs in a corporate machine.
The power of a question is absolutely amazing sometimes. If you ask someone a question, psychologically it makes that person feel like you value their opinion. It makes them feel “important” and usually it makes them wonder about the answer themselves if they don’t know the answer. It’s an easy way to flip someone’s world upside down, especially if you’re presenting them with new information entirely.
What does this have to do with magic? I think it has to do a lot with magic. It has to do with how easily things can be missed by people, and how easily perceptions can be changed. A simple question likely changed the entire day for the people who were working there. It made adults into curious children. It made their lives a little bit more interesting, and showed them if only for a moment just how much you can miss that is right in front of you.
It isn’t so much an exercise in magic itself, as it is in psychology, and how that plays a part in the types of people who become magicians. I really do wonder now if people really don’t look up normally. Is this the kind of mentality that separates the magically minded from the average person?
I guess I can use this to segway into a similar story. Back when I lived in Portland, and my lizard was about a couple of feet long, I had him out with me during the summer months quite a bit. Sometimes I walked him on his leash downtown, and other times I sat down on benches with him right next to me, so we could sun ourselves.
I was sitting at the bus stop with him once, and a lady moves to sit down right next to me, almost on top of my lizard. I politely stop her, and when she realizes what she almost did, she backed up a couple of feet- she had thought my lizard was a purse. She saw the color of leather, and his tail, as a strap, and her mind filled in the rest to create an illusion of what experience told it was there. I have had that same exact reaction a number of times- they all think he’s a purse, because they aren’t actually looking. At some point they stopped looking, stopped experiencing the world around them, and only saw the world they expected to be there.
I had other people flat out denying that my lizard could be “real” and had to be some kind of toy or something, when he was sitting right on my shoulder, flicking his tongue out and looking at people. The mind is terribly good at denying what is right in front of it.
Sometimes what you think is a purse is actually a lizard, and sometimes all it takes to see something new in the world is to actually open your eyes.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Home

 
Starting in April 5th, I will no longer have a place of residence. I will be using this time to travel extensively for work, saving up money for several months worth of rent for when I return to Washington, and to draw, paint, and reflect on what matters to me most in my life and how I'll be getting there. I'll be staying with friends, and traveling across the country...all of which brings me to the thoughts I've been having the past few days on what the idea of "home" is to me, and how it shapes how I view the world and the situations I'm cast into. 

Home is something carried in the heart. It isn’t a physical thing. It isn’t something you can see, smell, taste, or touch. It isn’t something you can grasp with your hands only to have it taken away from you. Home is an emotion. It’s something we grasp with the fibers of our soul, and only we can remove ourselves from that place. If one truly knows what it is to be, this is something that can be understood. 

Without the meaning we give it, our lives mean nothing. We fight, we struggle, we die, all for the sake of survival…because no matter how much we may sometimes feel worthless, there’s a part of us that knows that we’re worth it, if only to ourselves. This is my experience at least. 

Growing up in California, I often wished I could find “home” it was something I longed for, something I wished I could understand. I ran from the place I was expected to call home, more times than I can count. I found solace in travel, in continually moving forward. It was something that gave me strength. Maybe because in wandering aimlessly, I was able to find comfort in my own sense of home-less-ness. 

It took me losing…..so much throughout my life for me to understand that the only sure sense of home you can hold onto, is carried within the self. Places can be taken from you, people can oust you from places where you lay your head, and territories can be taken by the strongest… but who can take you from yourself but you? Who can take the beauty of the world from you? Who can take from the world the beauty in the reflection of a solitary raindrop? Who can take from you the heavens, with all its wonders? 

I have lost nothing. My heart may hurt from time to time, but the fact that I can feel it at least means that it still belongs to me. What is life except what we make of it? I can spend my time worrying, or I can spend my time doing. I know one will get me somewhere, while the other leaves unanswered questions, and something to be desired. I know there’s nothing to do but to move forward, and to know that there are people in my life who I treasure, and who treasure me. I am not alone, and I have lost nothing. 

Soon I begin a new journey, but in the end I know that I will be stronger and wiser for it, and that in just a couple of months, this weary heart will be warmed by a loving embrace once more.