15 Oct Learning to See
I’m in the midst of a five-week Grand Tour that’s taking me the equivalent of 1.7 times around the globe, from Japan to London, Dublin and Wales, to Bali and then back to San Francisco. One of the great lessons I’ve re-learned on this trip is the importance of slowing down, how, wherever you may be – a palace in Okinawa or a pub in Dublin or a temple in Bali — the more closely and precisely you focus, the more you see.
And I’ve been remembering one of the most vivid times this lesson was brought home to me, on a six-day family getaway about a decade ago. On that trip my wife, our two teenaged children and I had sauntered along palm-fringed beaches, eaten sumptuous feasts under the stars, splashed in a gracious courtyard pool, and sunbathed under alabaster skies – but in many ways the most memorable experience had been a visit to an art museum. That’s right, an art museum.
Now I realize that that the words “museum,” “teenagers” and “highlight” don’t often find themselves in the same sentence, but on this trip we joined a family-oriented tour, and the results were eye-opening.
Our group of two dozen visitors, equally divided between kids and adults, was led by a young, enthusiastic docent who shepherded us right away to a 1613 oil canvas painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder. She asked us all to look very carefully at the canvas for 30 seconds. Then she led us away from the painting and asked us what we had seen. A flurry of hands shot into the air.
“Birds!” said a seven-year-old.
“An elephant!” said another.
“A warthog,” one little boy enunciated proudly.
After we had each named one animal or bird we had seen, the museum guide read back our list of wildlife, then asked, “Do you think that we’ve named everything in the painting?”
“No!” came a bright chorus.
“Do you think we would see more if we looked again?”
“Yes!”
She then handed out two postcard-sized sections of the painting to each family group. Each postcard presented perhaps one-twelfth of the canvas. She asked us to study these for a minute, to see if we could find something no one had named so far.
After a minute she asked each group what they had found.
“Peacocks!” one bespectacled boy enthused.
“Camels!”
“Turkeys!”
“Parakeets just like we have at home!”
“Lions!”
The docent carefully wrote each species down. Then she looked at the children. “Do you think we’ve seen everything in the painting now?”
She led us back to the canvas and we looked at it with new eyes. “What else do you see?” she asked, and we pointed out owls, a shepherd, a distant castle, a long trailing line of beasts and a tiny ship in the background.
“Do you notice anything about the animals?”
“They’re all in twos!” one of the youngest said.
“That’s right. Have you heard any stories about animals in twos and a ship?”
There was a pause and a girl who had been silent so far said quietly, “Noah’s Ark.”
Our guide went on to talk about how a painting can tell a story, and how Jan Brueghel the Elder had used his canvas and paints and brushes to make us see an old story in a fresh way.
As she talked, I thought about the bigger lesson we’d all just learned: the rich rewards of paying attention, focusing, really learning to see. I thought about how we’d learned to appreciate the preciousness of each piece – and the wonder of how many pieces fit into a whole.
Half an hour later, when we walked out of the gallery exclaiming about the meticulous way the artist had brought even faraway flocks of birds to life, the sky was a deep blue and the flowers crimson against green leaves; birds twittered from silvery trees, and in the distance terra-cotta roofs shone against a sparkling sea – and we stopped all together, spontaneously, just to savor the scene.
Remembering that moment now, on a palm-fringed, blue sky-domed, insect-loud morning in a thatched hut in Bali, that same magic re-enters my life: Once again, a docent’s passion and a 400-year-old dream grace my world with a wonderful new sheen.
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