Appreciating Beauty in Everyday Life
A beautiful outlook can help you save your life. The power of art as a curative force. To be beautiful is to inspire. Beauty brings people together. There is a last act of saving, healing, and overcoming dualism in the experience of beauty, which takes us back to our roots. Beauty helps us forget our sorrows and focus on our happiness. -(Matthew Fox)
Shape, form, color, and harmony are all components of beauty. To put it another way, it's aesthetically pleasing. It's something we take in through our eyes and ears. The language used is not derogatory or crude in any way. Quite the opposite of anything low or unattractive, in fact. Examples of beauty include a black-eyed Susan flowering in the yard, stars in the sky, chic architecture, and a metropolis at nightfall.
Everywhere we go, there is something lovely to see. The only way to enjoy it is to stop ignoring our immediate environment and start paying attention to it. The splendor of a winter sunset, the silhouette of a passerby, and my own reflection in the glass all capture my attention. The sound of rain on the roof, the call of a loon over a placid lake, and the steady trickle of a river all have a special place in my heart. To my nose, I detect the sweet aroma of a woman's perfume, the freshness of a garden flower, and the savory flavor of spaghetti with meat sauce. The sublime has made an impression on me, and it is lovely. It causes one to feel astonishment and wonder. I can still hear the waves breaking and see the wide open road with the gorgeous mountains in the distance. When I look around, I am constantly struck by the attractiveness of the women I see. I find inspiration in works of art like Rothko's color field paintings and Monet's impressionist masterpieces. The trumpet notes of Miles Davis or Peter Gabriel's ethereal melodies move me deeply. I see the contrast of nature (a tree) with the exceptional design of a building, or the beauty in public sculpture and architecture.
We deliberately shut out the splendor of everyday life. One explanation has to do with the prevalence of distractions today. Everywhere I go, I see individuals preoccupied with their phones or obliviously listening to music on their headphones. A woman crossed the street the other day without looking up from her smartphone once. While crossing the street, she narrowly avoided being hit by a driver in a fancy car who was in a hurry.
One more is that people are impatient. It seems like everyone is in such a hurry these days, especially city drivers. Yesterday, I witnessed a young man in a sporty BMW slam the throttle when the light turned green and race to the next stoplight. He missed to glimpse the beautiful flowers or pretty woman waiting for a bus. On Sunday mornings at 7 a.m., when most people are still asleep, I like to take a drive along the highway and watch the cars zoom by like they're on the race track at the Indie.
Fear also hinders our ability to appreciate good design. Many people are immersed in contemplation, brooding about past regrets, worrying about of the unknown future, agitated by the obligations of job, family, and other commitments, which blind them. As humans, we tend to become numb to the beauty that surrounds us on a daily basis due to the monotony of our routines. Boredom, routine behavior, and daydreaming are common outcomes of a monotonous daily routine. And so we fail to appreciate the beauty in intricacies of people, places, things, objects that enter our line of sight every day.
Having an aesthetic outlook will allow you to see the aesthetic value in everyday experiences. You should start noticing and thinking about things just because. Awareness is a precondition for paying attention to the minute particulars of your existence. We must pay close attention. The next step is to hone your visual perception skills. Look around you and notice the lines, shapes, forms, colors, patterns, and textures that make up what painters term the "visual aspects of art." The work of famed 1960s urban landscape photographer William Eggleston is worth analyzing. He was interested in the "visual poetry" and "eccentric vision" of everyday life. His home became his studio, where he could work undisturbed. He took interesting pictures of a variety of everyday objects and scenes, including a light bulb, TV, sink, gas station, pool of water, and random passers-by.
A city is like a museum full of amazing works of art just waiting to be seen. Learn to appreciate the simple pleasures of life. Find it in the every day, the fantastic, and the magnificent. When you visit a new place, bring your camera and take pictures of anything that makes you feel awed, amazed, or delighted. Dorothea Lange, an accomplished photographer, famously stated, "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to look without a camera." Photographer Ansel Adams once said, "A great photograph is one that fully reflects what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being taken."
Taking up photography has helped me appreciate the intrinsic value of observation and documentation. Everything from the composition's lines and shapes to its colors and contrasts and textures and even the spaces between the objects that make up the composition. Unless it's terribly cold or rain would harm my camera, I try to go for a walk about the city every Sunday with my camera. Like William Eggleston, I intend to photograph the urban scene in all its varied and interesting guises, including buildings, bicycle abstracts, attractive passers-by, and other urban elements.
I found that a cure for my boredom was to take photos of interesting and lovely things. It's what positive psychologists call a "flow experience," where I lose track of time because I'm so absorbed in what I'm doing. Taking images is a rewarding hobby that allows me to indulge my artistic side. Sometimes, after capturing what I consider to be artistically significant photographs, a whole day stands out in my mind. Taking photography allows me to capture and savor the beauty of both the everyday and the remarkable in my trips.
Beautiful things are often the inspiration for some of the best drawings and sketches. Learning to sketch or draw will help us see the extraordinary in the commonplace. They can be used as mediums for creating artworks like still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, or as visual thinking tools for coming up with novel solutions to problems. We develop our capacity for imaginative observation and thought through the practice of sketching and drawing. To improve your drawing and sketching skills, it is necessary to develop your observational eye. The next step is to capture on paper every nuance of what you saw, including color, shape, form, and texture, as well as the obvious lines and outlines. When you sit down to sketch or draw something, you have to really pay attention and look for the little things that make it unique.
By taking in the splendor around us, we can elevate our spiritual selves. Each of us has our own interpretation of what spirituality entails. What I call "the hunt for the sacred" is the pursuit of anything worthy of awe or amazement, anything to be revered or respected. Taking in works of art, whether at a museum or out and about, may be an enlightening spiritual practice because beauty encompasses anything artistic that brings joy. Using our senses in this way is a spiritual practice. To avoid becoming preoccupied with one's own thoughts and instead focus on the world around them is the spiritual practice known as "mindfulness" in Buddhism.
We all share beauty," writes Michael Fox, author of Creating Spirituality. It hits us without discrimination. An appreciator of beauty can never have enough of it. Amazingly beautiful geometric designs may be seen even in the cracks in the sidewalk. Even though the world seems awful, if we photograph it and enlarge it, we will notice that we walk on beauty every day.
'Nature constantly bears the colours of the spirit,' Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote and reflected.
Taking in a stunning view is a mental treat. The realization that "Art sweeps away from the soul the dust of ordinary existence" comes to me whenever I create a photograph that I will remember and find lovely. This is a Picasso-styled paraphrase of a The ability to appreciate beauty has helped me to focus less on my problems and struggles and more on the positive aspects of life.
