Tag: people

Beauty equals…

lily

“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one’s own – even more one’s own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.” Katherine Anne Porter, journalist and author

I’ve been trying to position myself towards the topic of beauty for a long time now. I have been brought up in a home that did not celebrate beauty. “Beauty is only skin-deep” was probably the most often used statement about beauty that I heard as a child. It was of course used in order to show that assigning importance to looks is superficial but I think that more often than not we were quite confused about the statement. Because if it was superficial and we generally should not care about it, why did we have to look good when we were visiting relatives?

Anyhow, ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’ was a saying that many liked to sing when we were growing up and, to be honest, I see it now as more damaging to children’s understanding and appreciation of beauty than helpful in building their characters. What I do not like about this saying is that it discredits beauty per se, it discredits the need for looking after it, it discredits the need for creating it and if said too often, it basically stops us from looking after the beauty that we are surrounded with and the beautiful people that we are.

Beauty requires effort. It takes work and purposeful, regular practice to create it. It also takes knowledge and dedication. I only truly understood this through my life experiences over the last few years: growing a child, making things for our house and garden, writing and photographing. What I have learnt is that beauty thrives with care and creativity and care and creativity entail effort. Creativity is effort, it’s seeing details, it’s being able to mould materials until they take the shape that we want them to take, it’s also about learning how beauty is made and about practice. It’s about spending time and often exerting ourselves to reach the outcome that we want to have, and finally it’s about tending to it regularly, taming it’s wildness. Beauty can be shallow but usually it is not. Usually beauty is work. It’s a lot of work nurtured with love and affection.

Shouldn’t we therefore teach our children that beauty should be respected rather than disparaged?

The more affection we have towards who we are, what is within us and what is around us, the more beautiful…

everything becomes.

Light the dark Sunday

Lightthedark UK2

Australia did it last week. It’s our turn now. In support of refugees and asylum seekers light a candle in front of your house Sunday 13th Sep at 9pm. Light the dark UK. Light the dark The World.

The lesson

klolik

I was in a shopping centre yesterday. I bought my son a little toy. One of these tiny cars that you wind up and they drive off on their own in whichever direction you set them in. My son played with it, giggled loudly and was really really excited about it. We walked together towards a play area in the centre and my son saw a crying boy. He walked towards him and put the new wind-up car in his hands, took a step back, smiled to the boy and laughed with joy.

When I described this to someone we briefly concluded that it’s good that the children can share. Then I thought about it for a while longer and decided that what I witnessed was not a lesson in sharing but a lesson in compassion. The simplicity and honesty of the situation was astounding. One little boy saw the other one in pain and did what he could to relieve the pain of the other.

Why do we as adults find it so much more difficult to behave in this way? Have we been educated out of compassion? Are we educating ourselves out of it?

How often have we crossed the street to avoid a person in pain? How often do we ignore the pain of our friends or family members? Why is the pain of others so difficult to acknowledge?

Complaints and Gratitude

mint

People who complain are not necessarily unhappy. Often, they just try to strike a relationship with others through complaining. Sharing suffering, even about the little things, can be bond-creating and frequently functions as a conversation starter, an icebreaker.

– The bus is late again…
– Oh yes, it was delayed yesterday too… They even wrote about it in the local newspaper how unreliable the buses are these days….Do you read XYZ?
– XYZ, oh yes , I do. Would you believe it if I tell you that I have its very first issue.

And here… the connection is triggered, the conversation unfolds, the stranger at the bus stop is no longer a stranger but someone who we share suffering with and the discomfort of our day-to-day experiences. In that sense the complaint is an invitation to a longer dialogue. It is not its conclusion. It’s just a start…

I do a fair deal of complaining in my life. Recently perhaps a bit too much. (You see… I even complain about my habit of complaining :) ))))))) But I think that disappointments are part of life and it’s good to notice them and share them too. There is something quite artificial in noticing only the bright side. March is the time when we complain a lot in our northern hemisphere. Because our days are not quite long yet, our flowers our not entirely out, and to be honest our strength and resilience to cope with challenges ahead has probably only just started building up. In March, we only manage to lift our smiles up from our heavy woolly scarves, and it takes another month or two for this smile to establish itself and for more cheery conversations to emerge.

Complaints are not always a sign of unhappiness, but are often a sign of a struggle of sorts. These struggles are part of our human stories and they are bound to happen somewhere in the process of realizing our new ventures. This is usually when most complaining goes on. When we are at the beginning of those journeys. Gratitude comes later…

…and it’s great that it does.

This is my Easter Egg for you Lovely Readers. Thank you for your messages, conversations and kind words. My doctoral research is developing very very slowly (but surely) so I still cannot offer regular postings in this space. I hope you are all well and that you’ll have lovely Easter. Best wishes and feel free to leave a complaint ;) x Alicja

fruit present

Appreciation

Appreciation“Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
~Voltaire