Pearl Before Breakfast, 2007, Weingarten

Maybe there are millions before me linking their blog to this beautifully written piece, Pearl Before Breakfast by Gene Weingarten (published by Washington Post Staff Writer in 2007).

Anyway, I just read the article this afternoon when a friend emailed me the article. It read “Slow down in 2009” in the subject line so I thought it must have been the one of many articles that encourages you to slow down, look around and appreciate the beauty that life has to offer rather than focusing on work and recession and global turmoil. Yadda yadda..

But then I read the preface and got hooked.

For those who hasn’t read the article, it is about the experiment made by the WP and Joshua Bell, a young virtuoso, who the latter played as a street musician, dressed down like one and took a stand in the busy Metro in Washington. It is far cry from his typical performance where people pay a minimum of US$100 per seat and a standing ovation thereafter.

Well, aside from the good article (won Pulitzer, hey?), it really does remind me, to breath (because I usually hold my breath while working), to smile, to talk, to hug, to look at someone in the eyes and say that I care, to prioritize...

because routines could have its way swaying me from what really is important: my life.

To end this, quotes below are ones that I really really really like and take to heart:

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us.

And then there was Calvin Myint, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight. There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. ...And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.