Journal of Sacred Work

   In an effort to connect and create community, Americans send each other tens of millions of emails each day. Among them are the ones that share some "amazing" story or image. Some stories are apocryphal, made up just to spread some kind of rumor. Others are sappy. Still others, like this Journal, are meant to inspire.
   Every so often, something fascinating comes along. Such an example was forwarded to me by my younger sister. It takes two minutes, fifteen seconds to watch. Here is the video link: http://www.maniacworld.com/frozen-in-grand-central-station.html…

   You may have seen this video already. It’s the one in which several
hundred people decide they are going to do something very unusual. At
exactly the same moment, they suddenly freeze in place in the middle of the biggest train station in the country.
   In essence, these actors create an artistic performance. Like all artistic creations, some passersby notice, others scurry along as if there’s nothing special about a couple hundred people who suddenly freeze the way we all used to do in the children’s game. Except these are adults and it’s Grand Central Station.
   As the character Alex says in Dane Dakota’s play Who Loves Judas: "Art is meant to dynamite us out of our sleepwalking." This video has the potential to do that. If you watch it more than once, you’ll see what I mean.
   Patterns are so seductive that we fall in love with them. And we resist anyone who wants to pull us out of our somnolence.

   Are we truly alive when we repeat our patterns as if we were robots? Caregivers, ordered by rule books and protocols to repeat the same procedures day after day are at great risk for disconnecting from life and their own humanity.
   If you live in a large city, you’ve seen a great and common example of human beings in semi-coma states. They’re the folks that ride the subway. In the cool community of the T in Boston or the Metro in Washington D.C., we fall into the same, dull-faced expressions – as if ordered to do so by some unseen hand.
   Perhaps our coma-like state doesn’t matter on the subway. But it matters to patients when caregivers adopt mechanical behavior during the intimate encounters essential to good caregiving.
   This is why all caregivers need to stay in touch with art. And it’s why it’s worth taking a glance at a two-minute video of a community of actors who decide to challenge the routine of everyday by creating art in an unexpected place before an audience who, moments before, were in states of lowered consciousness. Does we have to have, quite literally, a bombing or an assassination for us to become fully present to our life events?
   Perhaps caregivers need art training to be effective. What do you think?

-Erie Chapman