Yesterday I was looking for a silver chain as part of a present for a friend. Not a piece of jewelry per se<\/i> — I already had the thing I wanted to hang on the end of the chain. I just needed the chain itself.<\/p>\n
So I walked into a jewelry store in the neighborhood, one that Google Maps had told me was a likely candidate. The nice woman there said that they don’t sell silver chains. They only sell complete pieces of jewelry.<\/p>\n
Normally, she said, she would send me up to the jewelry district on 47th St. But yesterday being a Saturday, none of the places up there were going to be open. So she suggested I go to the KMart on Astor Place.<\/p>\n
That seemed unsatisfying to me. Big box retail outlets are so generic. Somehow, the energy seemed wrong for what was supposed to be a personal gift.<\/p>\n
Besides, I was on my way to check out a multimedia yoga class in mid-town, for which some friends of mine had created procedural interactive music and computer graphics. I thought surely there would be someplace along the way that would do the trick.<\/p>\n
Now here is the interesting part: Because I was looking for a specific type of store, I found myself looking very carefully at my surroundings, far more than I usually do. I started noticing cafes, music shops, convenience\/liquor\/hardware\/stationery stores, a Salvation Army drop-off center, and lots and lots of other things besides.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t that these places hadn’t been there before, just I had never really noticed them. For some reason, having a “mission” was making me hyper-aware of my surroundings. Even when it came to places that were completely off of that mission.<\/p>\n
I wonder whether there is a general principle here. Perhaps when we are focused on finding something, we switch into a general mode of gathering information from our surroundings. Maybe there is a specific mental mode of “looking for things”, a legacy of evolution, that activates some salient part of our brain and causes it to kick into high gear.<\/p>\n
It turned out that the woman was right. I found no shop yesterday between Greenwich Village and midtown that carried silver chains. Although I did discover lots and lots of other cool places, some of which I plan to go back and visit.<\/p>\n
That evening I went to the KMart on Astor Place, shortly before closing time. Sure enough, they had exactly what I was looking for.<\/p>\n
Which I guess shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, if you want to buy a chain, what better place to look than a chain store?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I was looking for a silver chain as part of a present for a friend. Not a piece of jewelry per se — I already had the thing I wanted to hang on the end of the chain. I just needed the chain itself. So I walked into a jewelry store in the neighborhood, … Continue reading “Chain reaction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18459"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18460,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459\/revisions\/18460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}