Mind Moves: "What is this life, full of care, We have no time to stop and stare"- (W.H. Davies) It's a grey overcast morning as the train pulls out of Kent station and heads for Dublin. Armed with my laptop and gifted with some welcome downtime, I settle into putting shape on different thoughts that have been buzzing around my head in the past few days, writes Tony Bates.
Opposite me is a lady deeply engrossed in Hello magazine. Lucky for her, she gets to fill her senses with pictures of people who look shiny and new. I see an upside down Beckham and his family strolling across the cover with grace and elegance.
She is captivated, or so it seems to me, with the carry on of leading "celebs" perhaps because they are people who get to live her dreams, or because she imagines life affords them incredible opportunities that must surely be fulfilling.
Actually, I discover I have her all wrong. When the arrival of the snack trolley breaks the silence between Hello and my laptop, I learn that she thinks it's all so much "crap" and she only picked up the magazine because David, her hero, was on the cover.
Do we ever really know what's going on around us? Or do we just pick out superficial details and assume the rest? It's so easy to become locked into our own story of what the world is about and miss the real story that's unfolding around us.
As we go through life we organise our understanding of the world into neat categories, or "schemas". To cope with the intense amount of new information we are routinely exposed to, we tend naturally to view the world through these schemas or, in other words, to view the present through the lens of the past.
At one level this is an efficient use of our mental energies, but unless we are open at some level to what doesn't fit with our schemas we fail to update them and risk becoming quite stale in our take on life.
It's all too easy for us to fall into a lazy short-sightedness, where we automatically cancel out any information that doesn't fit with what we expect.
A story captured my imagination this week and got me thinking about how much we miss when we don't take "time to stop and stare". An article, "Pearls Before Breakfast" in the Washington Post, described a social experiment with Joshua Bell.
Some of you may actually have tickets for this virtuoso violinist who will soon be performing in Dublin. Ranked third best violinist in the world, he agreed to take his instrument to the entrance to the Metro station in Washington and play for morning commuters.
He played some of the most beautiful and intricate music ever written on his 1713 Stradivari violin, employing the same physicality and passion that has become his signature on concert stages throughout the world: Bach's dauntingly intricate Chaconn, Schubert's breathtaking Ave Maria, Manuel Ponce's sentimental Estrellita.
In the 45 minutes Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped to listen for up to a minute, before moving on. Twenty-seven gave money, totalling $32 and change. But some 1,070 people hurried by, oblivious to this genius and his playing, although they passed within three feet of the man.
There are various interpretations that we might validly make of this outcome (and indeed the original article in the Washington Post considers many of them).
But one we might want to chew on for a while is that we all too often fail to see the beauty in front of our eyes. It's almost as though beauty, mystery and the unexpected are irrelevant. All that counts is that I can see the world today in the very same way I saw it yesterday.
The point of this experiment must surely not be to judge any of the passersby, but to wonder about what I might be missing in my life when I only let in information and experience which fits with what I expect of the world, and when I dismiss out of hand whatever doesn't fit with and confirm my world view.
Meanwhile, my neighbours across the aisle are talking for Ireland. There is hardly a moment's pause in the chat and laughter that's flowing to and fro between the four of them. Long live the give and take of easy conversation, where people feel included and connected.
We're good at this in Ireland. This is our "social capital" and we grow it in a natural organic way when we allow ourselves to stop and appreciate each other.
The Beckham fan breaks our silence again and asks me what I'm doing. I answer her honestly and we get into a conversation that was both open and remarkable. She shared a story from her own life that revealed resilience and courage in the face of a painful challenge.
Although I had almost missed it, I realised that, as the train pulled into Heuston, I had heard Joshua playing.
Tony Bates is founding director of Headstrong - the National Centre for Youth Mental Health ( www.headstrong.ie) . Contact (especially if you have a spare ticket to the NCH): tbates@irish-times.ie
