Albert Einstein once declared that “the most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical,” proceeding to state that “he to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”
I have often wondered at the tendency toward a general blandness exhibited by many people’s choices. How does one become a person who chooses the most ordinary thing possible in almost any given circumstance? Conversely, what is the lifestyle that breeds a general childlike curiosity and openness, the only point of departure for any real newness?
More macroscopically, as a created landscape tends to reflect the sensibility of its resident culture’s dominant paradigms, it seems that one can’t help but also wonder at the populaces whose histories and cultures have over time consistently led to one extreme or the other. What is the situation that cultivates a childlike curiosity? And alternately, how does a culture mange to produce largely identical choices even in the midst of a relatively free society? In the latter instance, I’m not speaking of Soviet imposed monochromaticism, but of a free culture outright choosing the least imaginative options available among a spectrum of possibilities.
As one universal trait of children tends to be a natural tendency toward curiosity and creativity, how do ennui-dominated cultures ultimately come to be and how do they remain that way? How is it that a given culture can so consistently manage to quash a general tendency toward originality, so that it ends up being the inborn trait of childlike curiosity that becomes the real endangered species?
Unfortunately, it’s the simplest thing in the world, and even more tragically, it seems to most often result from an unconscious authoritarian tendency (Soviet achitecture again being a notable exception in its deliberateness). The process of creating a lockstep mind in the midst of a free society is in fact as simple as something I witnessed the other day:
While visiting the breathtaking Monterey Bay Aquarium, Redhead and I were enjoying ourselves in the tide pool area, trying to steal a feel of the velvety sting ray. A little boy was doing the same, enraptured in the undeniable mystery of the ocean, when what must have been his mother scolded him harshly and abruptly pulled him away - and clearly without any regard for the value of the activity in which he was involved (and at the aquarium!). This is the precise instance of devaluation, the same as the moment in which the sad, lost teacher instructs her precocious preschool student that coloring the duck purple is actually somehow incorrect. Over time, this is how we stop bothering to explore.
How strange to realize that remaining a creative individual can in fact be one of the most difficult and rare activities in which humans engage.
