““We all have a blind spot around our privileges shaped exactly like us,” Junot Díaz has said, and it can create blindness to failures all around. 25 It results in the Einstellung effect: the cost of success is that it can block our ability to see when what has worked well in the past might not any longer. In the face of entrenched failure, there are limits to reason’s ability to offer us a way out. Play helps us to see things anew, as do safe havens. Yet the imagination inspired by an aesthetic encounter can get us to the point of surrender, making way for a new version of ourselves. Our reaction to aesthetic force, more easily than logic, is often how we accept with grace that the ground has shifted beneath our feet. 26 “Art is a journey into the most unknown thing of all—oneself,” architect Louis Kahn stated. “Nobody knows his own frontiers.””
