Hello again. I am facing a transportation crisis. My ride to the Y on Saturdays is taking six months to train as a yoga instructor. Six months of Saturdays she won’t be going where I am going. Sigh.
I do not begrudge her her dream. She will make a great instructor. Just a minor inconvenience but I have started to assess my resources. I have started to network and reach out. You don’t know if you don’t ask. What can they do? Say no? Big whoop.
I was asking about posting a sign or something, asking the girl at the desk. A woman I had never seen before joined the conversation. She comes past my house on the way to the Y. She had just started Zumba and exercise in general. Being responsible for me would get her to class. She was going away for a few weeks but she might be able to give me a ride when she got back. I could live with that.
Moral of the story? a) You don’t know if you don’t ask. b) There are a lot of good people out there. c) God works in mysterious ways. d) All of the above.
Moving right along. This morning yoga class started with the reading of a commentary on a stunt the Washington Post pulled in 2007. The Post put Josh Bell, a violin virtuoso playing one of the finest violins in existence (crafted in 1713 by, of course, Stradivarius), in a subway station and asked him to play Mozart. This is a man who packs concert halls around the world. His violin is priceless.
The statistics from this little adventure were as follows: 1,097 people passed by. 7 stopped for more than one minute. Bell made $32 and change.
The commentary and articles I found alluded to Matthew 7:6, “do not throw pearls before swine”. I would prefer to think that is not an accurate application of the Scripture. I do not believe we are all so brutish the finer things are wasted on us. I would prefer to think many people, as I often am, are just too taken up with day-to-day life to even notice the extraordinary let alone stop and take it in.
While no one enjoys sensory loss, having low vision may actually give some of us time to stop and listen to the Josh Bells of the world. We might now have fewer responsibilities and more time to be mindful, more time to be in the here and now.
How many extraordinary things do we ignore because we are ruminating over something that happened yesterday or that we are worried about happening tomorrow? My father would call it stopping to smell the roses and he always told me I needed to do more of it.
I cannot honestly say I am mindful of the extraordinary. I would like to think that should I find a Stradivarius being played in a subway, I would kneel down in awe and reverence. However, I am realistic to know that is a bit far fetched. I would probably be one of those thousand plus people running for my train. Not exactly proud of that.
How about you?