“Recently, my wife and I visited San Diego’s Balboa Park art museum. We were thrilled to revisit Monet, Van Gogh and other European impressionists whose style of painting celebrates light and color.
But, it was a sight NOT displayed on the Museum’s walls that I found to be most illuminating that day.
Rather, it was a play of light and hue probably unseen by any other person that day. When patrons visit the upper floor exhibits, as did, you can walk up a three-story staircase, partially lit by rectangular win-dows of ordinary, textured glass.
While my wife browsed the museum shop, I idly waited on a nearby bench. Clipping-on my polarized sunglasses, I anticipated our sunny walk back to parking. Sunglasses on, I gazed at the ordinary glass pieces lining the stairway. At once the ordinary-looking, dull window glass now gave off an astonishing array of evanescent colors: vivid pastels of blues, yellows, pinks and greens!
Doubting my own “seeing,” I took off the sunglasses — only to verify that the plain glass had no such colors. My amazement overcame my doubt. I wondered if I was witnessing a planned artistic display by the museum or was I alone seeing an unexpected optical illusion? I asked a museum guard nearby if he knew about the colored glass. He answered indifferently and said “no” when offered to show him the pastel glass panes through my sunglasses.
This ordinary experience left me with a desire to find out the cause and effect of the chameleon-like glass.[1] But all too often we humans shuffle through life “seeing – but seeing not” the extraordinary in even amongst the ordinary experiences, events and people. It’s easy to block the extra ordinary things all around us.
Sometimes, all it takes to really “see” some sight with new eyes is to focus on the wonders around — like watching two black teenagers jump out of their car to help an old woman tottering her walker cross a busy street. Or feeling awed by bird song or being amused when your kids get the giggles.” Many of us prize our “modernity” so much that we fail to see the wonder and truths all that surrounds us.
There are metaphysical human aspects of our surroundings and lives that we bypass even when we “see” or experience them. This is especially true with ethical or spiritual insight. We may receive moral, behavioral and revelatory guidance from conscience, our “gods” or from the Universe. Thus, we are less inclined to choose not to see beauty or spirituality that we’re intended to enjoy. We would be better off if we were to “see” and be more aware of the un-ordinariness of ordinary events and people around us.
On further inquiry, I found that polarized, glare-reducing lenses re-organize “white light” into ordered arrays, and thus the colors show up. Polarizing is caused by natural phenomena, explained scientifically as scattered, angular light waves being made more regular, re-centered around magnetic poles. This rearrangement process uses lensing techniques discovered by George Eastman of Kodak famed within ordinary museum windows.