Thinking more about yesterday’s post, I believe I may have cleared up a mystery from my younger years.
When I was an undergrad, some of my fellow students seemed to travel in a different orbit from the rest of us. A case in point is Peter Sellars, now well known as a theatre director (he once directed me in a play when we were both at Harvard), was already, as an undergrad, getting the world to do his bidding.
For example, for Sellars avant garde student version “Boris Godunov”, which he directed while he was still a sophomore, he got the city to let him stage the famous coronation scene as a parade down one of the busiest streets of Cambridge.
To put this all in context, when I was a sophomore I was still watching reruns of cartoons featuring Boris Badenov.
I think one difference between us was that Sellars had already mastered a powerful skill that many of us only develop much later: The skill of truly paying attention to the world outside of one’s immediate circle, and understanding that world on its own terms. With this skill comes the ability to make things happen on the larger stage of life.