Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.
One of the trivial hills I will die on is that your teenage years, and your twenties are pretty handily the worst two decades of your life. I don’t know why we portray the pinnacle of your life as when you’re 25, a few years out of college, and flailing around trying to decide what to do with the vast expanse of life ahead of you. For me, the real reasons your twenties, and high school, are so difficult is that you are really trying to figure out who you are, what you love, what re-energizes you, what drains you, what your values are, and what you believe to be good, true, and beautiful about the world. This played out in my life as I spent high school and my first couple years of college living and breathing athletics. I played every sport imaginable growing up, from soccer to tee ball, I spent a few years swimming, culminating with not really knowing what I wanted out of a college experience except I could play sports. One of the questions I wrestled with through out this time, that frankly I don’t think many of my teammates thought about once was that of aesthetics. Namely what is beauty, and why do we find things beautiful.
Take for instance these flowers. I took this photo a few months ago in early spring whilst I was walking through an alleyway near my home. To me, they were beautiful. I can even use words to describe what I found in them beautiful. The varying shades of light pink, rose colored, and white. The curves of the petals as they unfurled, reaching towards the light. The layers of each bud, curled and stacked on top of oneself as if they are attempting to distract someone from reaching, from finding the hidden gem inside, a maze. Whats crazy to me about these flowers, and about what we attribute beauty to in general, is that no amount of thinking -or pontificating- adds beauty to them. They are beautiful, whether I stop and thinking about them and why I find them beautiful, or not. A sunrise needs to introduction, no pretext, for you to be pulled beyond yourself, to for a minute be transported into the painting we see across the sky and be reminded of our own finite humanity. No amount of our thinking adds beauty.
But despite my words for beauty where does the beauty within these flowers lie? They are made up of the same atoms as you and I. These atoms are colorless! Identical! They smell of nothing, and are indistinguishable from one other. They are the reflections of the sun, striking tissues in our eyers, and moving along our nerves to the endings in our brains. Which as an aside there is within psychology the ongoing discussion into the mind-body dichotomy, which is just that. A farcical dichotomy since our minds our made of meat and our bodies contain all of our thoughts and feelings. My point: there is no actual color in the atoms of which these flowers are composed, or in those vibrations. Shape, size, color, touch and the like are simply the names we call our sensations, and no amount of study can ever bring the notion of beauty to our world. In a letter to a long time friend a college aged CS Lewis wrote “ Beauty must therefore arise from some nonmaterial relation between the tree and myself. That there is Something right outside time and place . . . and that Beauty is the call of the spirit in that Something to the spirit in us. “
I’ll be honest, in my 15-ish years thinking about the question of beauty, I still feel as inadequate talking about it now as I did when I started any query. Growth in life isn’t birthed from ones ability to succinctly answer the life long questions we wrestle with, but from the capacity we hold to see inside of ourselves and accurately see our place in the story. To recognize what our strengths are, what are weaknesses are, to see the incredible miracle of stardust we represent as we balance our view with the scale of how small we are compared to the stars themselves. While we might not be getting “better” at answering the questions, we grow as we find peace with what questions we are asking.
At different points in my life I have wrestled with the idea of a God, or a creator, and even though I feel peace where I am at for now I am still left with more questions than answers. But maybe that is the point. In a poem that almost rips the full Lewis quote word for word the author says “beauty pulls me beyond myself like I don't even have a choice, so I know I don't believe in nothing.” I think despite the oscillation in my own beliefs about the cosmology of the world I land somewhere near there. I don’t believe in nothing. That might be the point. Of love. Of hope - which I want to write about soon. Of beauty. It’s poetic, it’s imprecise, like fog. But it pulls us beyond ourselves.
..I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rilke
Thank you for joining this foray into this merriment, love, and sorrow. This view that life holds that ordinary and the unique. The common and the uncommon. Thank you and I’ll see you next Monday.
ℹ️ Read more about Monday’s Don’t Suck here.
📬 If you like this newsletter, please consider sharing with others who might enjoy it as well.
👉 If you’re new here, sign up to receive future musings.
💬 Reply to any of these emails to open up a conversation, I always respond.