Once when I was at work a careers psychologist came and gave the staff a pep talk. He said "If you're on a bicycle and you see a snail up ahead of you, your mind will repeat over and over 'I will not bike over that snail-I will not bike over that snail..." But often, your bike wheels go straight to it - and over it - and you can't understand why.
I went into a dream and never did find out the psychological answer but I figure that someone is concentrating so heavily that their sub-conscious mind only hears 'snail ... snail ... ride ... ride ...". And you ride right over the poor thing.
The same with ornaments. On Waiheke Island, from the Red Shed Arts Collective shop at Palm Beach, (specialising in Waiheke Island residents' artwork), I bought a lovely little ornament of a swimmer/sunbather-sitting-on-a-beach-towel.
The lady in the shop bubble-wrapped and newspaper wrapped it heavily. I carried the ornament intact for 300 metres, from the artsy-craftsy shop to the coffee table in the lounge of my holiday home before I broke the darn thing! The wafer-thin "towel" snapped right in half on contact with the table. All the way from artists' shop to holiday home, my mind had been worrying about "how will I pack the ornament for the journey home?", and "should I perhaps carry it for safety into the cabin of the plane instead of packing it in my bag?", and "oh-goodness-if-I-break-it-I'll-just-die!"
Was all this akin to the snail thingee? By worrying about not breaking my ornament had I set myself up to -shudder! - break it? Who knows? I very amateurishly glued the 'towel' back together, then J, my swimming buddy who is also an artist, dabbed a matching colour along the crackline.
And I still love my little ornament. It reminds me so much of slapping up the sun at Hataitai Beach.
Here's a pic of the broken ornament, before its repair. The artist is Waiheke resident, Jacqueline Riley.
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