Dawn's Notes
Listen to the Music - June 2016
by Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW
The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for a feature story by Gene Weingarten in April, 2007. Here’s the story.
A man sat at a metro station in Washington, D.C., and started to play the violin. It was a cold January morning. Three minutes went by, and a middle-aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace, stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried to meet his schedule.
A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip; a woman threw the money in the till. Without stopping, she continued to walk. A few minutes later, a man momentarily leaned against the wall to listen to the violinist. But the man soon looked at his watch and walked away. Clearly, he was late for work.
The one who paid the most attention was a three-year-old boy. His mother tried to nudge him along, but the child kept stopping to listen to the music. Finally, the mother pushed hard. The child continued to walk but kept turning his head to watch the violinist play. Several other children tried to stop to listen, but all the parents without exception forced their children to move on.
In the forty-five minutes the musician played, only six people stopped and stayed for a while. Some gave him money but continued to walk their normal paces. He collected a total of $32. When he finished playing, silence took over, but no one noticed it. There was no recognition, no applause.
In the forty-five minute concert, the violinist played six pieces by Bach while thousands of people passed through the station. No one knew that the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written on a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days before playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out all the seats in a theatre in Boston; the seats averaged $100 each.
This is a real story. Joshua Bell’s incognito performance in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste, and priorities. The outlines were: In a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?
One of the possible conclusions from this experiment could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?
In the above true story, the children, rather than their parents, seemed to realize that something great was going on right under their noses. But the parents all hustled their children along.
After a loss, in a sense, it may feel that the music has stopped in our lives. The pain of grief and loss can, in a sense, dull the “music” that may be around us every day. Life may even feel hopeless and purposeless, at least initially.
Sometimes we too, like those at the metro station, live our lives at such break-neck paces that we scarcely take time to appreciate the beauty in the world. Maybe it is time to start slowing down, to pause, and “listen to the music.
Call about the next "Living Life after Loss" Group at:
Meadowlark Hospice
709 Liberty, Clay Center, Kansas
(785) 632-2225
Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW, Group Facilitator