No.197

These days most of us are either constantly overwhelmed or getting very close to being constantly overwhelmed. And for those who do not feel overwhelmed in the slightest, there is usually a price being paid somewhere else. We are sent into spins of fear and feeling by all the things we need to get done, by the consequences of not doing those things, by the lack of time we have to process the deep and difficult happenings both in our close world and in the worlds of others, with the internet propelling us day in and day out toward noise, and comparison, and numbness. When the world feels unbearably large and largely out of control, what I’ve found is that there is almost always reassurance and meaning to be found in the smallest of things, in the smallest of beauties.

We currently live in a beauty drought. This isn’t because the beauty isn’t there, but rather because our current definitions of the word are not spacious or welcoming or inclusive, and because beauty has been pressed into strange, stale shapes by people and systems that do not have our best interests at their hearts— they don’t have hearts, in a way. The word beauty has left most of us feeling confused, less than, and undeserving. Feeling that beauty has left us behind. Beauty has become something to buy, something to own, something to flaunt, but as I was reading just this morning while eating a piece of distinctly average cheesecake:

*Susan Johnson

To me, beauty stands alongside love and gravity in holding the world together. From what I have observed, the only one of those we haven’t picked apart is gravity, but with love and beauty we have taken shadowy, winding roads that have, in fact, led us away from love, away from beauty.

However impractical it may seem, I am going to try and help you find your way back to beauty. Simply because when we are held together by beauty, there is more room for liberation and less room for fear. More room for gentleness, appreciation, and empathy.

It won’t be as simple or as instant as refreshing a website that is loading too slowly for your liking. Rather, it will be more like putting a delicate, very broken vase back together. But it is crucially important that we crawl back to beauty however we can, to find new definitions of beauty that allow us to be fully ourselves, powerfully noticing, and expansively human.

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This is a slightly edited version of the introduction to my most recent book, Everything, Beautiful: A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World. It has only taken me seven whole months to share the introduction here because a) I mostly forgot that I could and b) publicity of my work is not what I would consider a default setting of mine, though I’m trying to improve.

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings by Marina Rolfe which look alarmingly like how the inside of my head feels on more days than I’d care to admit (I am thoroughly admitting).

Things I could have told you about but did not: how I keep neglecting to buy an indoor plant potting mix, how instead I ordered four books this morning, that I’m yet to encounter an accountant who emails you back, that it’s actually Thursday at this moment, that the refill store had run out of cinnamon but will have more in next week, that it really doesn’t matter how much or how intensely you vacuum carpet it will always seem unclean and in light of this I have mostly given up.

Reading next: Patience by Toby Litt