people make the place

Some people look for a beautiful place. Others make a place beautiful

Hazmat Inayat Khan

The Office on the surface is a boring uneventful show. It’s literally about a failing paper company. People with ordinary lives. Mundane lives filled with the triviality of everyday.

Yet it’s probably the most compelling show I’ve watched (and rewatched). Why?

It comes down to the people.

It’s a show about ordinary people. Fallible ‘boring’ yet interesting, funny, angry, sad, loving, caring, destructive, chaotic and frustrating people.

It zooms in on conversations. Sometimes emphasises awkward silences. People talk over each other. People are unhinged.

That’s what makes it compelling. Not the physical location, but the people.

The prison was never the place, but the perspective

Where ever you go there you are is a common Zen saying. One might be in the midst of beauty, yet the mind can conjure fantasies of ‘better places’ in the non-existent future or the partially remembered past.

The solution is to really see the stories. Drop them. And pay vivid attention to your surroundings. Feel the sensations of the wind, hear the birds, pay attention to the passing of phenomena. The world will be infused with magic.

You infuse the world with magic. The people make the place.

I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn’t stop where it once used to

Rainer Maria Rilke