In Pursuit of Beautiful

We had a reverse sleepover last week, my granddaughter and me. Reverse as in, I pack my toothbrush and go to her turf. We play on her swing, with her toys, in her room with the purple wall (“GG, I love purple, do you love purple?”) and the trundle bed with dinosaur sheets that slides out for sleeping two. 

When it’s time to wind down, we make a snuggly nest of pillows and prepare to read. I pull a random book from the middle of the stack on the floor as Austyn huddles up beside me clinging like a monkey to a tree. Excitement dripping off her nose, she listens intently, as I begin: 

“How do you do that?”
I hadn’t realized I’d said that out loud
but the sculptor looked over and replied,
“You simply do it.”
“Oh no. I could never do that.”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“I just know.”

I read and point and turn the page, read and point and turn the page, read and point and turn the page. And then about half way in...

“This book is not beautiful,” Austyn announces, as if surveying a banana to buy or not buy at the store.

“Beautiful.”  Leave it to a three-year-old to succinctly define the gauge.

My “beautiful” is not the same as Austyn’s. Neither is it the same as yours. And yours is not the same as mine or your spouse’s or your mother’s or your neighbors’ down the road. Beauty thrives up and down a sliding scale of ever-changing parameters. Its corners are defined by taste and time. To argue about what it is or it isn’t, is to fall in an ugly rut.

But to know it—what it is to you and for you and in you—is to carry a homing pigeon in your soul. Leaning toward the beautiful rarely, if ever, leads us astray. And the pursuit of it gives us a life we can’t get our arms around. Blessings reproduce on top of themselves.

It is quite easy, though, to spend the girth of our lives enmeshed in anything but. Beautiful, that is. We expend energy on roads that lead to nowhere worth going. We spend time churning for an end we’re not even sure we want – or worse yet one that leads to another that before we know it, chews up all the good we didn’t know we had.  Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives.” I laugh every time I quote her at her inclusion of “of course.” She threw it in to poke us for living as if we don’t believe it’s true.

Chasing beauty is not to be confused with running after rainbows or unicorns, or trying to touch clouds or catch sunrays in our hands. An unvarnished pursuit of the beautiful is actually the polar opposite of such squishy fantastical ends. Beauty is almost always deeply rooted in what’s real. And more often than not (think childbirth) it can be found encased in hard.

But when we choose it, when what’s beautiful is our filter for where we put our focus, for where the iron string hooks, it’s like pushing a magic bookcase that leads to a secret room. We’re granted access to a space where time both races and stands still. A space oxygenated by substance. Air pumped full of purpose that continually fills us up.

At Austyn’s proclamation, I tossed the “not so beautiful” book across the room and quickly plucked another from the tower on the floor. She giggled for a second, then locked into the story behind cover number two. As I read, she pointed out things I might have missed inside the pictures while interrupting on occasion to ask for clarification about words she hadn’t heard before. Apparently, my second selection cleared the bar.

Austyn’s ruthless standard of beauty-or-bust reminded me of how often I’m prone to settle. For a burger because it’s easy or a TV show because it’s on. For a chat that serves no purpose or a habit that holds the status quo. Her candor woke me up.

The days are fast and fleeting. Ho-hum is everywhere. But we get to draw the lines. Why would anything less than beautiful be our gauge?


P.S. Beautiful Crazy

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