Outside lies magic

I open my front door, walk down the steps to the street, and turn left. It’s only a block to the main street in my neighbourhood, with its many lovely little shops and cafes and a big grocery store and a library. The walk never changes, but the way I view the landscape always does. That’s because “outside lies magic,” which is a realization that everyone really needs to learn. You don’t need to be on a plane to Botswana to go on an adventure. As the hippies used to say, “its all a trip.” You just need to learn how to pay strict attention to your surroundings, no matter where you are, to discover the hidden magic in this world waiting for you. Yes, the world is truly a magical place, if you know how to look.

I have walked down the block from my house to the main street hundreds of times, but it never becomes boring. That’s because I have learned the how and where to look, and why I should. This knowledge comes mainly from a guy named James Stilgoe, a professor of Landscape History at Harvard University, or at least he was a professor at Harvard when I watched him on a 60 Minutes show on TV some years back. At that time, the Professor was basking in the pink, enjoying a bestseller titled (wait for it) Outside Lies Magic. His thesis was that “everything is interesting.” You just need to develop the faculty to keenly observe, the interest to pay close attention, to “see” the world in a certain way like the professor, a way that adds up to a conclusion, one that is worth sharing.

According to Stilgoe, everything in the world has a history, what the art world calls “provenance.” The ordinary landscape is brought alive by investigating that history. “Exploring as I teach it,” he writes “depends heavily on understanding the pasts that swirl around any explorer of ordinary landscape.” Stilgoe describes dull and ordinary items like storm drains and fire hydrants as touchable links connected to larger concepts, the history of a community, of an era, that are still visible around us, fossilized in the furniture of everyday life.

Everything from trees to shrubbery to a garage, he wrote, has a place and a connection to everything else. It’s vital to look closely at the details of everyday life, a concept that seems to have gotten lost in the modern world in our unseemly haste to arrive somewhere else as quickly as we can. Stilgoe claims this is why so much of the modern American landscape, our urban architecture, despite the money and materials we have to spare, is so bare and ugly and soulless. Attention is no longer paid to details in the service of economy.

But in such details lie fascination and joy. Don’t be in such a rush to be some place you are not. Wherever you are, that’s where you are then. So accept it, and learn to like it. To quote philosopher Baba Ram Dass: “Be here now.” Sink deeply into each moment like a hummingbird in order to drink deeply of life’s nectar. Awareness is next to godliness. Seeing the world around you, rather than floating through it like a robot, alerts the eyes, jolts the brain and challenges the soul. It’s ambitious and rewarding. It’s also fun. That kind of thinking permits even an airport waiting room to become interesting. Waiting for a plane is no different than sitting on the plane airborne, if you pay attention to details. Either way, you are on your way to your destination. But which approach is boring, and which exciting?

I remember once sitting in a waiting room in the new airport in Bangkok, waiting for the Biman Air crew to arrive. The wait turned out to be about 5 hours. Biman has a very poor reputation in the airline industry and delays are frequent. But sitting there and watching, the other passengers were fascinating to me. We were on our way to Bangladesh, which is a very poor country. Passengers wore peasant clothing. There were few suitcases. Most people put their belongings in cardboard boxes and burlap bags, all tied up with string. Instead of carry-on bags, they juggled fruit in their laps. I watched and memorized all the details. It was fascinating.

Stilgoe reminds us that important frontiers lie invisible in our own backyards and laneways and side streets, somehow lurking beneath our conscious awareness, just waiting for our attention. Though more interested in showing us how to see than telling us what there is to see, his descriptions of power-line right-of-ways, alley-side entrances, and hobo jungles provide compelling incentive for the reader to take his advice to heart, start looking around and asking questions.

The chapter in Stilgoe’s book about interstate highways touches on such things as graffiti written on the backs of highway signs, the dirt tracks that parallel expressways, road kill and what happens to it, and what seemingly random patches of wild flowers may really signify. Perhaps the best chapter of the book deals with fences and other ways people draw lines across landscapes to mark boundaries or to create the illusion of privacy. The good professor has a very sharp eye.

At the time of the 60 Minutes TV documentary, he had several hundred students working on several hundred fascinating projects, such as where and why coffee shops are usually located, the different types of raincoats and who wears them. It doesn’t matter what obscure topic people choose; the idea is to heighten conscious awareness by developing an attitude. Pay attention! It’s your life you are wasting, dimwit! The whole world is fascinating, if you learn where to look.

To quote one review of his book, Stilgoe “has had the academic’s luxury of thinking about things most of us have precious little time to consider: the permanence of the antiquated railroad bed, the hum of alternating current, the uses and meaning of fences. Evangelically advocating for exploration that can’t be accomplished by car, Stilgoe suggests bicycling and walking as ways of getting the news he preaches. The built environment, he lucidly reasons, is a sort of palimpsest, a document in which one layer of writing has been scraped off, and another one applied. The mindful explorer sees what came before, as well as what’s there.” Well, yes.

Studying the built environment and comparing it to what was there before is one way to accomplish the task of creating mindfulness. It’s a lot like looking for fossils in a cave. Boring? Perhaps, until you discover what you are looking for. It all comes down to one thing; conscious awareness. Turn off the chatter, stop all the introspection, pay attention, look up and around, and learn. The world is a fascinating place if you know how and where to look. All of life is a great adventure. It just requires the right state of mind.