Seeing Faces

It doesn’t take much to amuse me. I am forever noticing things and letting my imagination run wild. At the drop of a hat, I can invent a story and assign meaning to things that I see. That’s one way to keep myself from ever being bored.

I remember that as a child the most boring hour of the week was Sunday morning, sitting in church. My dad was the minister of our small church, so I was there every week. As thousands, nar I say, millions of small kids over the years, I squirmed and fidgeted in the pew as the church service stretched longer and longer. I always looked for ways to amuse myself. Often, I counted the pipes in the pipe organ which was at the front of the church. I played mental games measuring them and trying to estimate the center pipe. When that game had lasted as long as I could force it, I would turn my attention to the stained glass windows. The windows of our church were marbled design with no distinguishable shapes. But, I invented shapes and imagined designs, much like ancient humans looked at the stars and crafted constellations in the night sky. I mean, who would ever look at that set of stars and see a warrior or a bear? Well, that’s what I did with the stained glass windows. Sunday after Sunday I would challenge myself to find the same picture in the marbled swirls and add new stories to the display. I remember a particularly vivid scene with a small boy fishing on a river, all dreamed up by me.

In 1984 a tornado ripped through my small town. Much of the church was damaged, including some of the stained glass windows. My dad was able to recover some of the glass. He used his glass working skills to create small crosses out of the shards, which he gave to family and friends. Here is one of those crosses.

Now, all grown up, I still look around me and invent stories or assign meaning to mundane objects, just to amuse myself. I often get tickled when I “see” things that aren’t really there. Like many people, I often find faces in inanimate objects. I’ve recently learned from Merriam-Webster dictionary that:

“Seeing faces in inanimate objects is a common type of pareidolia, the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern” 

I love to stumble upon an unexpected face, as I go about my day. I get a real kick out of it. I thought you might enjoy a nice laugh by looking at some of the faces I have recently discovered.

And, my favorite, which I saw when I was in the kitchen preparing dinner. For real! I didn't stage it!

If you can’t have fun while you go through the mundane things in life, then what’s the point, right? I find it very satisfying to stay observant, engage my brain, stretch the imagination, and when necessary, engage pareidolia tendencies. My little unexpected friends cast a beam sunshine on my ordinary day. After all, inanimate or no, we could all use more feel-good faces in our lives. Am I right or am I right?