What Are We In, Without Noticing?
A Moment That Didn’t Ask to Be Understood
The essays leading up to this one were an attempt to explore some of the conditions many of us live in, which often lead us to believe that we must be the sole designers in shaping a life that might allow us to flourish. This essay turns away from that orientation to follow an ordinary moment as it shifts in ways that are difficult to anticipate or name.
Recently, I’ve been watching short videos of unsuspecting passersby on a crowded public sidewalk responding to a message board next to a portable electronic piano with the written invitation: Play Me! :)
After sitting down behind the piano and tinkering with the keys, a man dressed in blue farmer coveralls and a long-sleeve plaid flannel shirt, with a baseball-style cap dangling off to the right side of his head, approaches the piano. In a thick southern drawl, he starts to talk as if he’s making an announcement over the PA at Grand Central Terminal. His arms flail about like he’s just stepped on hot coals in his bare feet, and he blurts out:
“Golly gee! Would you mind if I try to play? My nephew’s been teaching me a song…”
A few people quickly agree to the stranger’s request, springing up from their seat and stepping around to the front of the piano. Others stop what they are doing and sit there like a frozen statue. On occasion, an individual will shrug their shoulders and tilt their head to one side, as if signaling an attitude of “whatever.” In nearly all cases, the stranger is allowed to sit down at the piano.
He starts striking the piano keys with only his two index fingers, stumbling to and fro across the keyboard as if it’s the first time he ever tried to play the piano. Responses by the observer to this seeming lack of skill range from boredom to impatience.
Suddenly, the seemingly talentless stranger launches into an expert rendition of a complex classical piano piece that seems to shift this momentary space being shared by two strangers. At the sound and sight of a prior inept piano player now transformed before their eyes into a virtuoso, faces soften and bodies shift. The observer is now focused on the dazzling piano playing taking place in the middle of the day on this crowded city street.
And then, he cuts his playing short, jumps up from his stool, looks at his wrist watch, and blurts out:
“Opps! I gotta run. I have a concert I’m going to, and I’m late.”
And with that, the stranger runs down the sidewalk like a bat out of hell, quickly disappearing into the crowd. The observer is left standing there alone.
In many of these clips, the observer doesn’t immediately move on. They look around, sometimes waving their hands or shaking their heads with facial expressions that hover between disbelief and amazement, as if something just happened and they aren’t quite sure how to make sense of it yet.
A casual reading of this street encounter between two strangers can easily be described as an imaginative prank that created a brief “gotcha moment” for the unsuspecting passerby. But if you have a chance to view multiple clips of these moments, subtle signals are showing up, in different ways, indicating something other than just being fooled might be registering during these encounters.
Merely observing what took place only from the outside and concluding that it was nothing more than a clever trick is not unlike examining a human body solely by its outward form and deciding that this is all there is to a human being. The observation itself is not wrong, but it assumes that anything not visible in that moment doesn’t matter. In both cases, what we conclude depends greatly on how we choose to look.
When the stranger swiftly disappeared, the passerby was left standing alone, and nothing obvious had changed. The hustle and bustle of the street returned, bodies continued to mosey along, and that moment dissolved back into the flow of the day. And yet, for that brief stretch of time, the usual demands and concerns of daily life seemed to recede into the background, and something hard to name briefly took shape between player and observer.
How often do moments like this pass through our day unnoticed, not because they don’t happen, but because they can be difficult to stay with once they do. This essay does not attempt to name what was present in that shared space or suggest how to recover it. It simply pauses long enough to notice that such moments occur, and that noticing them may already be a different way of being in the world.