Today was not a good day. One could even label today as a shit-day; it was terrible. Even though it was terrible, I tried to find some tiny speck of goodness in it. If only to write about it in this blog, I wanted to find something beautiful.
By the time I have a good handful of entries in this blog, I am going to loathe the word ‘beautiful’ and it might begin to lose any value that I have ever attached to it. I hope that doesn’t happen, but the optimistic pessimist that crawls underneath my skin won’t let me think otherwise.
I call this a stretch: my beautiful moment came today while I was sitting on the subway coming home from work. It was cramped and uncomfortable and smelled like piss and body odor. People looked exhausted and overworked and worried about the money they wish they had. People were blasting music in headphones on the other side of the train, and I was able to hum along. The woman to the left of me had a rough smokers voice and smokers hands but the body of a 13 year old girl. The boy to the right of me was very skinny so he didn’t hinder my sitting space, but he did keep hitting me with his skateboard.
I took a book out of my backpack and began reading where I had left off. The book that I pulled out was Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. He is the author of The Tipping Point and I have been meaning to read that. This was on the 20% off new paperbacks rack at Barnes & Noble and I was in need of a new book. I digress…
I am still only 30 or so pages into the book, but introductions always seem to be my favorite part. The irony here is that the beginning of this book discusses how the snap judgements that we make are usually, if not always, more accurate than when we take a long time to thoroughly investigate something and then make a judgement call. They define these two different techniques as “thin-slicing” and “thick-slicing”, respectively. Ok, back to the train ride…
The beautiful moment that arose from all of this, in the midst of my shit-day, was when I realized something – something that I had always known but never recognized: I am good at snap-judgements. I have an excellent reaction time; I pick things up not after they occur, but during. There are always exceptions, but reading this book brought attention to something crucial about myself. It was as if I connected intimately with the author through time and space and medium; this book was reading me for a few sentences here and there while I was reading it. The way that written word can affect the psyche if beautiful. That moment, during my awful day, where I was physically exhausted and uncomfortable, my body ached not for sleep but to continue engaging in this book. That positive ache, is beautiful.
