Where do you find beauty?

What is beauty?

These were the questions floating through my mind this morning as I sat in a college classroom, listening to my professor talk about literature in all of it’s brilliant forms. Looking out the window, I conceded that the natural world is one obvious answer.

But it’s obviousness dulls the point.

There’s nothing poetic left about looking at a sunset and feeling moved or standing in front of the ocean and feeling infinite. These things have been done before. The poetry has been sucked out of them already. They are somewhat universal truths at this point, making them cliché. Which isn’t to say that they aren’t vastly important, sublime, earth-shattering things to witness as a human being. Of course they are. All I’m saying is that if you write a poem about a rose being red, no one is going to lose their mind.

FINDING BEAUTY

So I looked elsewhere. I walked past the ocean, through the art gallery, over the stack of books, and away from the poetry. I skipped past films and spring flowers, moved along from attractive bodies and faces, forgot about cultural ideals and favorable aesthetics, and arrived somewhere within. All of these things are like casings that we wrap around ourselves as concrete answers to big questions like “what is beauty?”. They serve as a catalogue of reference.

But there is more.

There is infinitely more beauty existing just outside the parameters of what we deem “beautiful” than there could ever possibly be within them. And when you take that journey, past sunsets and Picasso’s, and you arrive in that dangerous, unchartered, labyrinthian space that houses all of the things no one tells you are beautiful, I think that’s where you can begin to map out your own answer.

When I enter that space, I notice that beauty becomes less about what I can see and more about what I can feel. The key word being “can”.

Let me explain.

I’m one of those people who are fascinated by death. I read books about it (see list at bottom), watch movies about it, view interviews and poetry readings and all of the things. I’ve seen all of Grey’s Anatomy like four times. It’s a problem. There’s just something magnetic about it to me, like seeing a car crash on the side of the road and not being able to look away. You know that it’s going to change you in some tiny, irrevocable way but you can’t resist. I think that this is partially because in America, we have quite an unhealthy relationship with death itself. We treat it as if it is optional, as Atwul Gawande explains in his book Being Mortal.

We act like it’s not the most natural thing that will ever happen to us. But that’s a whole other post.

REMEMBERING DEATH

What I want to say here is about memento mori, or “remember you must die”. I promise this is circling back to beauty, stay with me.

I read all of those books and watch all of those videos because I have a deep fear of taking life for granted. I think we all do. But people are always saying when they get sick that they wish they could have lived with the freedom imminent death has afforded them.

When you watch videos about people discussing what it feels like to know they are going to die, more than anything, they seem more free than any of us. They seem in touch with what’s important. They’re unable to take anything for granted anymore. And I’m not saying I want to die. But I am saying that I try to hack that feeling of gratitude and liberation.

I read these stories and I feel something of what this dying person was feeling and then I go out into the world and feel the sun on my face and am overcome with such relief that I’m not imminently dying, that I get to live. I’m not sure if this is entirely healthy, but I am sure that it’s unhealthy to live with your head so far away from the earth and it’s natural processes that you cannot appreciate the beauty in the mundane until it is being taken away from you.

Which is the point I’m desperately trying to reach. Beauty is simply being able to feel love for life, one that the reminder of death tends to amplify.

Perhaps because I have lived though times where that love was no where to be found. Perhaps because it is the backbone of any meaningful existence at all, the foundation upon which all the rest stands.

Yes, art, writing, authenticity, brilliant books, clear blue skies, milk swirling into coffee, Saturday afternoon baseball games, self-expression, cities and smiles from strangers—these are all beautiful things that contribute to my love for life. But they aren’t that love itself. They aren’t beauty itself. Real, down to earth, worth fighting for, never let it go beauty is being able to feel them at all. That’s a superpower. And it’s one that we tend to fight against, for we learn early on that caring makes us vulnerable to pain.

Beauty is caring anyway. Beauty is allowing yourself to remain open, flawed, messy, and passionate for everyone to see. It’s having big feelings about the world.

Which is to say, it’s just being alive.

SOME SPECIAL BOOKS

As promised, here are some of my favorite books about death, which, really, are just books about life:

• When Breath Becomes Air
• The Last Lecture
• The Year of Magical Thinking
• Let’s Take the Long Way Home
• Tuesdays With Morrie
• Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
• Being Mortal

To read about the unexpected beauty I found in New York, click here for More Than the MoMA.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)

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