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.
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