Flying in a plane, it’s hard not to recognize that you’re part of something larger than yourself.
It’s not only the trust you must put into the hundreds of people who played their role in making you airborne — from the pilots, engineers and machinists, to the traffic controllers, maintenance crews and ticket sellers — It is the clear-eyed view that you suddenly get of your everyday environment.
As you climb in altitude, the relentless immediacy of the world around you fades. It first recedes into an unconvincing Fred Rogers model town. Then, with greater distance, into a living, breathing super-organism, something like a probiotic culture left to grow in a jar of milk.
From so many feet up, you see snaking highways, winding roads, gridded streets, and the constant movement of thousands of people, each of them pursuing their independent interests, often unaware of their countless connections to the others around them.
Zoom in on any one of these individuals and you have a whole person, complete with feelings, drives and biases so much like your own. Their tastes and priorities, interests and goals, backgrounds and means may differ greatly, and this is reflected in the tremendous diversity you witness on the ground below.
You see a man-made pool below you, huge and rectangular, the color of the inside of a lime, glowing with the near-fluorescent intensity of a deep sea algae bloom, and you wonder at it.
It is rock quarry, and you realize that someone in this world became so interested in rocks, saw such poetry and practicality in rocks, that he decided to do this, and to get hundreds of others involved.
Flying over another city, you see similar pools, this time curving in the shape of nature, some a burnt orange, some a startling hot magenta. They are salt evaporation ponds, and some small group of people saw such impossible beauty and usefulness in salt that they brought so many other human beings together to make these unforgettable and unpretentious triumphs.
Off in the distant horizon, there is gentle white smoke billowing from what must be a power plant. It seems to burn cleaner, more timidly and with fewer stacks than you ever remembered. In the foreground, there is a smattering of proud little wind turbines, and monolithic black slats turned on their sides, soaking power from the sun.
Over your life, you have seen even the character of the streetlights change: Once a dreary and doleful orange, struggling with grimy resilience to scare away the night; now slowly supplanted by bright-eyed blueish-white bulbs, ebulliently challenging the sun.
These are everyday triumphs, mundane miracles that care little whether you notice them. They just keep on being crucial to our lives, regardless of what we acknowledge and what we distract ourselves by.
It has been said that it is the job of the artist to make magic of the mundane.
If that is true, then the world seems at times, to be filled with artists. Sometimes, they simply forget that they are.
If you aspire to be a professional artist, then you must be able to zoom out 30,000 feet, and zoom back in, right on top of and inside of any one of those individuals below. You must be able to see them from each of these angles and tell them the story of themselves.
You can do this with words or with notes, with a single image or an ongoing chain of them. But you must do it.
You must make their story your own, and your story, theirs. You must tell them what you see, and help them see themselves.