In part 1 in my series on Beauty, I talked about how beauty needs a broader definition. I related it to finding beauty in myself, but also that it can apply to so many things in this world. Today, in part 2, I examine the cost of looking for (and finding!) that beauty.
I saw a picture on Instagram (@earthfocus) which led me to a conversation with my husband that jokingly started like this “I want to go to there”. It wasn’t too too far off, and going there actually became a distinct possibility. But the catch was, I wanted to go when the Christmas lights were still up, because I wanted it to look just like the picture. So we planned a trip to Quebec City in early January. The resulting trip and subsequent pictures were some of the most magical in my entire life. Even my dearly-loved husband, very much a non-romantic, told me the streets were “almost magical”. (Did my husband just say something was magical?? But he did, and it was.)
Whether we are visiting a uniquely beautiful place, staring at a beautiful painting, looking into the peaceful face of a sleeping child, hiking through a colorful woods, or even experiencing a lovely smell, emotions buried deep can come to the surface in an instant. Some things are universally considered beautiful. Some things are only beautiful to us. But either way, it doesn’t change the force of our reaction when we face something we find truly beautiful: something raw and real wells up inside. It shakes us and awakens us. It can be so evocative that we can feel things we haven’t felt before or feel them more deeply and richly than ever.
Sometimes our reaction can even feel painful. Sometimes tears come to our eyes and we want to cry. Our soul is crying out that this is what life is about, this is abundance, this is real and everything else is just a sad imitation.
But the moment doesn’t last.
My favorite quote by C.S. Lewis (in The Weight of Glory) sums it up so well:
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
Our beautiful moment of raw and real emotion is gone all too soon. We can’t put it in our back pocket and pull it out whenever we want a piece. It is happenstance and ephemeral. It is that very fleeting nature of a beautiful moment that makes it so precious, but also so painful. We want to hold on to it forever.
There was a moment in the Pixar movie Soul when #22 (in Joe’s body) sat down and watched a seed fall to the ground. It wasn’t a big, dramatic moment. It wasn’t profoundly beautiful in the classic definition of the word. In fact, it was rather ordinary: a seed fell from a tree onto a city sidewalk. Someone else could have sat in the exact same spot and caught the exact same seed and felt nothing.
But to #22, it changed everything. It was just a moment, but it was the moment her soul came alive and she decided she wanted to really live.
My example of old Quebec City in January is a bit silly, but my point is that in order to catch that fleeting once-a-year beauty, we had to endure some of the coldest days we have every experienced. We had to hunt down something we knew to be beautiful, but the cost was frozen fingers and toes!
Sometimes the cost is just being cold. Sometimes it’s just taking a little time out of our day. Sometimes it’s that we look a little silly. But sometimes it’s allowing ourselves feel something real that may scare us, to allow ourselves to be changed, and to really live.
Beauty is all around us if we really take the time to look (especially if we remember to broaden its definition). Opening ourselves to its evocative nature may feel very vulnerable or make us feel exposed but it is the path of abundance.
And that is beautiful.