Stop and Smell the Rotten Chicken: Taking Pleasure in the Small Things?

An informal study was conducted recently, in which a world-renowned violinist quietly entered a Washington DC subway station and began to play. For nearly an hour he stationed himself and sung out on the strings of his Stratovarius some of the greatest music ever made - Bach, and Brahms, and Beethoven. And hardly anyone stopped to listen.

After hearing of this little social experiment I decided to conduct a study of my own. Below my office window a flower has been quietly breaking through the cracks of the concrete. Its bright red petals stand out starkly against the pale gray and green around it. I sat and watched this small beauty, and I waited to see who else would take notice of it. But nobody stopped. Nobody bent to inhale its fragrance. Nobody even slowed their steps.

Were the subway experimenters and their violinist right? Have we really become so rushed, so absorbed in our own lives, so unappreciative of the small joys that surround us that we can't even pause for a single moment to take in something special? Have we really become so immune to beauty?

It is actually quite easy to ignore the world. In fact, it takes a concerted effort to really take notice of it. We spend the vast majority of our days in air-conditioned insulation. We walk with cell phones and iPods pressed to our ears. Most days we go from house to car to office and back again, floating along in self-absorbed isolation. For all I knew I could have been passing a billboard of Picasso's Guernica on my daily route. I had never really bothered to pay attention.

Is this natural? Has it evolved, as the psychologists would ask? Maybe it's a way of neutralizing things so that the important parts of life jump out at us, like the lion behind the rock. Or, maybe it's a way of conserving mental energy, like the way we don't feel the weight of our clothing or notice our feet tucked away in our shoes. Until, that is, you drop a book on your toe. Then your entire brain is filled with thoughts of the tiny appendage. How can it suddenly be so painfully prominent? How could we not have noticed it before?