Mona Lisa's Buttocks and Kim Kardashian's Smile
We are so surrounded by miracles that we have become strangely difficult to impress, and at the same time curiously easy to distract.
Years ago I decided to exercise my tourism muscle and spend the weekend in Paris. Tourism is not a strength of mine. However, Paris is close, and, in my mind at least, the fact Paris is an hour ahead of London time meant that I would be spending an hour less being a tourist in Paris than if I'd gone to the (just as interesting) London.
With sore feet and little enthusiasm I checked off tourist stuff from the list, ticking boxes and using that awful phrase all travelers seem to like... "done the....". "Have you done The Eiffel Tower? Have you done the Pyramids? Have you done the Grand Canyon?" Well, having "done" Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe the grim reality dawned.
The time to "do" the Louvre was fast approaching.
Doing the Louvre involved walking for 25 miles down corridors looking at paintings I neither cared for, understood nor had any context for, but, like 99% of the other box tickers in there, I had a glaring empty box in my itinerary.
The grim smile, or is it a smirk, of The Mona Lisa, suggested to me that Leanardo da Vinci (who I agree waited far too long for his Oscar) had known that in centuries to come his masterpiece would become a tick box on a list of disheveled, disinterested and largely uneducated tourists (myself included).
As I entered the room which displays this enigmatic portrait there were at least a dozen or so heads between myself and the image, and not sure if this counted as a tick I stretched to get a better view. Then all of a sudden the entire crowd shifted excitedly but gently to a corner of the room affording me a perfect view of this admittedly captivating piece of art.
Those behind me, like the rest of the crowd, focused their full attention on the corner of the room, where a somewhat disinterested (and probably pissed off) mouse was busily going about its business. If this Divine intervention was designed simply to give me a better view I am not sure but what I found incredible was that the mouse was suddenly more worthy of attention than the masterpiece. I wondered at the thousands of miles traveled and money spent to get a glimpse of the Mona Lisa and yet a simple anomaly of a mouse in an unexpected place seemed to wake everybody up to a more immediate reality.
On reflection I think this slightly bizarre experience is one of the consequences of living in such an amazing world. We are so surrounded by miracles that we have become strangely difficult to impress, and at the same time curiously easy to distract. It seems that the sublime nature of our reality and the very miracle of our existence is not such a big deal but a glimpse of Kim Kardashian's buttocks brings the population to life.
I suppose the mouse in the Louvre was an anomaly which is why it caught people's attention and that argument holds for Kim Kardashian's buttocks, but our very existence and all around us could also fall into that category. (Although an exhibition of the Mona Lisa's buttocks and Kim Kardashian's smile might be a money spinner).
The intelligence which pulled this beautiful planet, with all of its joy and pain, has so spoiled us with its continual and unconditional providence that we have, for the most part, stopped noticing its magnificence. We may be moved by an amazing sunset or a "peak" experience or whatever that intelligence dreams up to reconnect us for an instance, but if we able to pay more attention to each moment that connection is ALWAYS there, ALWAYS available and ALWAYS incredible.
Its as if we say to that intelligence, "make it a big and impressive event and we will acknowledge you, but the million little things in every moment and every day...not so much!"
That intelligence is becoming more obvious to more people and is the basis for the shift of consciousness which, to my mind, has already happened. The world does not need to change to evidence an evolution of humanity, we just have to notice what is already there. The intelligence hasn't changed it's game to get our attention, it is our attention which is changing. Our attention has greater awareness associated with it.
Quantum physics demonstrates that the act of observation changes the nature of reality. The shift in consciousness is simply changing the way we look at things and as our our observational perspective changes so does our reality.
Observe form fear or love.
Kim, Mona, mouse or all three. The choice is yours.
Love
Bill