Week 17: Find Beauty

I apologize for getting behind last week, but I will hopefully catch up with two posts this week.

Dr. Hanson asks this week "what are some things that are beautiful to you?"

This may challenge you if you are in the habit of 'not noticing.' The ability to notice and appreciate the subtleties that make something "beautiful" is something that can be learned and practiced.

As noted in previous weeks, noticing requires that you be in the moment fully with sensory apparatus turned on and dialed into maximum gain. It means not rushing in action or judgment, and taking time to be fully enriched.

There have been times and places in my life when I have had to say to myself "take a good look, you will never be here again." Those moments stand out in memory because I took time to absorb the experience and really let it sink in. Sometimes those experiences are so rich they hurt, in an exquisite, almost ecstatic sort of way.

Ecstasy is the experience of total involvement with an object in your awareness. It brings about an altered state of consciousness in which thought or action or attention is suspended and the object consumes complete awareness. Nothing else exists for a moment and you are totally consumed. The effect is total joy.

I had the pleasure last Saturday of attending an outstanding performance of Beethoven's Ode to Joy, the anthem of this very experience. The first three movements allude to the human struggles and sufferings of that time in history, while the fourth movement explodes into transcendence. My favorite part is when the orchestra bursts into auditory fireworks in the final crescendo after a slow steady upward progression. It was Beethoven's expression of his hope for mankind. This music is exquisitely beautiful and appeals across generations and nations for good reason.

In the movie Immortal Beloved, the aged Beethoven remembers his younger self escaping his abusive father and coming to float in a pond reflecting the stars in the sky. His body seems suspended in the heavens and he is transported from his life of care.

I worry about the younger generation that listens to so much truly BAD music, that seeks altered states of consciousness chemically, that may have grown up on a steady diet of little more than mainstream entertainment, that is saturated with the incessant drone of machinery.

We should each have a outlet for creating beauty in our lives: woodworking, gardening, music, painting, mosaics, drawing, dance, writing, cooking. We need arts education in our schools to cultivate the skills that will last a lifetime, some vocationally but for all of us mentally and emotionally. The value is not in the quality produced but in the effort itself.

Your homework this week is to find something of great beauty. Flowers and graduations are blooming everywhere, so it should not be difficult.