Blaise Pascal advises that “In difficult times you should always carry something beautiful in your mind.” There are two tasks here. The first is to identify that beautiful something, and the second is to carry it.

There’s a tendency to assume that if you’re going to carry just one, then it’s got to be special. But that’s not true. Like awe, beauty does not succumb to hedonic adaptation. You become more sensitive to beauty instead of less. The experience of beauty, then, is like the stone tossed into the middle of a silent pond that doesn’t just make one ripple, but produces ripple upon ripple that reaches the edge and proceeds to ripple back to the center. More stones fall, more ripples erupt. Beauty can stir the soul’s surface continuously.

There is one image that I return to. It’s a rather generic picture from Unsplash that appears on my landing page (for now), and I’ll add it here, too. A large table of friends sit in a backyard with lights strung between trees. The table itself is a simple picnic table whose top is constructed of 1x12 boards—the kind I use to make bookshelves. It’s low enough that people are sitting on cushions and blankets, and the people vibrate with youth and vigor.

It’s all very festive. Welcoming. Intimate.

I’m longing for these kinds of connections and experiences. I don’t need to be in any of the romantic relationships. I can be the host who fosters these kinds of connections. The broker, if you will. The chef. The organizer. But I want to be present when people get together to enjoy a feast. A feast Nebuchadnezzar II would throw.

Yesterday, I posted about the importance of taking time away from your work to experience beauty. It came from John O’Donohue’s book Beauty: the Silent Embrace, and the full paragraph on page 20 reads:

To behold beauty dignifies your life; it heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons. To experience beauty is to have your life enlarged.

Dignifies. Makes you feel the worth of your life. That’s how I read it instead of it saying that if you don’t experience beauty you have no value. It allows you to feel the worth of your life. The worth that is already there. The worth that is you and your experience and your humanity. This dignifying process is what “heals you and calls you out beyond the smallness of your own self-limitation to experience new horizons.” These images are so… What’s the word I want? Powerful? I want to say beautiful, but that would short-circuit what I’m trying to say. I can feel the perspective shifting, like large gears rusted with neglect and inattention. They have nearly solidified but are now being challenged to move, reconstruct their perceptions, to break the bonds of rust that have formed over the years and deteriorated: you’re only as good as what you do. Breaking. Creaking. Groaning. That’s what the dignification process produces within when I’m healing and being called out beyond the smallness of my own self-limitation to experience new horizons.

Of course, I hear “experience new horizons” and feel the metaphor of adventure and travel drawing near. It is beautiful in my mind. It expands my life. It invites me to heal the present pain and step toward new horizons. I sometimes imagine the ancient type of feast from the picture above happening in some distant part of the earth such as on the island of Hydra in Greece or Corsica off the coast of Italy. I share this idea with a friend who says that Portugal is another option. Where a deep sea begins just on the other side of the trees with a small harbor and boats anchored just off the beach. Where friends that I met online in my work have gathered for a weekend to meet each other physically. A next step. An extra effort.

This idea expands my notion of what hosting could mean. Is anyone facilitating these kinds of rendezvous? Would something like this be actually possible to create? Would people whom I’ve interacted with from Romania, England, California, and India want to meet on an island in the Mediterranean? What a beautiful vision! I have no idea how such a thing might come to be, but what I’m especially attuned to this morning is the fact that a picture opened a window into another reality for me. Isn’t it amazing how generative our imagination is!

A beautiful thought carried about in the mind during hard times.

I’m wondering if that’s the healing O’Donohue is describing: the imagination’s healing. Beauty enables the imagination to dream in mirrored cascades that contain the warmth of a mother’s embrace, the colors of a spring forest, the shrieks and laughter of children at play, the aroma of rosemary and jasmine, and the taste of a bubbling soup next to a fire in January.

Beauty heals our ability to transcend suffering.

Our imagination is responsible for the hellish images, too. The shadows that touch our deepest insecurities. It allows them to romp about at will, as if the gremlins were doused with water and reproduced with ever increasing evil. They are the children of our fears, and the imagination knows them very well. It’s role is to only replicate what empowers it. Thus the need for beauty carried about in the mind.

Here’s an experience form yesterday. I am driving my oldest daughter from her therapy session to school. We pass a homeless man who’s belongings all fit into a grocery cart. The grocery cart has spilled his life onto the sidewalk like vomit for all passing by to see. I find myself weeping but trying to do so without my daughter noticing. I can see myself in the man. An entire life unaccounted for because fortune fits into a grocery cart.

I’m feeling great pity and admiration. What has kept him going? What has kept him choosing to live? What beautiful thought does he carry about in this difficult time?

On keeping one beautiful thing in mind

On courage

On a week’s beginning