No.181

Aug 06, 2022

Lately I’m finding that although much of each day is presumably filled up with or absorbed by thinking, I often find myself unsure of what exactly it is I’m thinking about. Unsure, even, of whether or not I actually am thinking. There is a large difference, for me, in how the body distinguishes between thinking and noticing, and of course there are both conscious and unconscious ways of a person doing both these things. I notice myself noticing much more than I notice myself thinking, but I must assume that’s primarily due to the inherent nature of noticing.

Another thing to consider is the difference between passive and active thinking, as it seems although many take for granted the verb-ness of thinking and that much of the time we walk—or sit—around totally unaware of the thoughts swishing through. Ignored oceans, of a sort. I’m reminded too that in some ways not being overly attached to one’s thinking or the results of it is a good thing to cultivate, that perhaps a less almighty effort in terms of thinking is something we need much more of.

We try so hard, I think, to think. We still place such absurdly high value on the thoughts of certain individuals although perceived importance is one of the largest tricks played on any of us. Ascribing value to one thing above another is an increasingly odd way of doing anything, and we encounter this too violently, for example, in how the lives of some people are deemed of higher value than others—as if those that breathe in and out look like statistics more than ancestors.

I’ve always had a very reassuring sense that my life—in the context of existences beginning and ending—is worth just as much as a swallow, or a sapling. This isn’t because I don’t feel my life is valuable but simply because I value those other things just as highly, and I suspect this is partly why over the last few years I’ve felt increasingly concerned with beauty and with modern society’s insistence that we punish ourselves and others on behalf of the word.

We are missing so many beauties, we are missing so many opportunities to notice the near-invisible, and I believe we are all finally beginning to realise that there is a desperate need for new stories to be told, and that those new stories might in fact be very, very old, and tucked inside the gills of fish, the fire-proof ridges of tree bark, inside the books that nobody needed to write down.

BOOK-RELATED NEWS:

This week brought word of another early review for Everything, Beautiful, in the August issue of BookPage, and I’m an introverted-ecstatic about it:

“In a world unspeakably darkened by crisis, it might seem trifling to even think about appreciating, cultivating or devoting our attention to beauty. Focusing on beauty might even read as an act of oblivious privilege. But perhaps a fuller contemplation of what beauty is, can be and has been, and what it can mean in our everyday lives, is in fact one step toward repairing massive-scale damage. Writer and illustrator Ella Frances Sanders believes it is. In Everything, Beautiful, she envisions learning to see beauty as a curative, even redemptive process, “like putting a delicate, very broken vase back together.” No matter how broken our world, it is nevertheless full of “tiny, beautiful things,” she writes. “Some are so invisible or silent that you may never see or understand them, but they are there.” Through text, illustration and guided prompts, Sanders upends and expands our notions of beauty and urges us to notice the ingredients for beauty that are all around us, such as “light, slowness, and the kind of air temperatures that feel like honey.””

What I hope, significantly, is that this provides another layer of what the book is about. I hope this because its contents are both simple and difficult to describe, and I don’t actually want my own descriptions of it to be the loudest ones. Everything, Beautiful is about reshaping and redefining ‘beauty’ in personally enriching ways, many of them small, and I therefore suspect that the ‘about’ of this book will be written by each person who reads it.