Blown Away By the Unexpected

A friend gave me a copy of the book “Perfect Wave” by Dave Hickey.

I’ve been slowly reading through each essay and highlighting parts with my red pencil.

When I got to the chapter “Cool on Cool”, this passage stood out. I want to write it down and share it:

there was this perfect, luminous pop single by the Carpenters that just blew me away. And, believe me, the Carpenters were the farthest thing from my kind of thing. But when something that is not your thing blows you away, that’s one of the best things that can happen. It means you are something more and something other than you thought you were.

I find this beautiful.

I should take more time to wonder at moments of surprise I did not expect.

What a beautiful thing that I can be plowing through my existence and suddenly be surprised by something outside my taste, my beliefs, even my identity, that reaches in past all those things and rearranges me.

Perhaps my boundaries are more porous than I assume. In an instant, I can become something different, something more that I ever believed was possible.

Just think, that ability is lying there inside all of us.

I don’t have to think of myself as a walled garden but an open field. Who knows where my boundaries will expand to next. All it takes is someone walking by and tossing out a seed I would’ve never chosen to plant myself.

(Tangential: I love this interaction between Jerry Seinfeld and Brian Regan talking about being “blown away”.)