It’s easy to get excited about a long pass on the football
field or a slam dunk in basketball. They’re visual, they’re beautifully
executed, and they’re good media. Society eats them up and pays up to see them.
Athletes become celebrities.
Actors are celebrities who are visible and accessible to the
public are well admired and compensated for what they do. Less celebrated and
less visible in society are dancers, despite their endurance, athleticism and
creativity.
But there are creative activities for which we only see the
endpoint—as if all we needed to see was the last half-second of the slam dunk.
We don’t see the intelligence, creativity and struggle that led to the work of
visual art or the poem. Often we see nothing at all of the clever and profound
mathematical proof or the beautifully designed scientific experiment that
brings startling results.
These are slam dunks, too. It’s just that fewer people get
to notice.
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