your job is to find beauty

Your Happiness Depends Upon How You Are Looking.

Photo Credit: Thomas Lloyd Qualls

​Just stop it, already.

You know what I’m talking about. You, telling that same old story about how impossible things are, how unfair. The story of how the whole world is rigged, and not in your favor. The story of inequality, injustice, oppression, corruption, lies. The story of why it is understandable that you are where you are.

I’ve said it before, this world is imperfect. In fact, in many ways, it’s down right broken. But that doesn’t mean it’s not also beautiful. Your job is not to fix all the problems. Your job is not even to point them out or to explain them.

Your job is to find beauty.

Because it is out there. And it is in here. It is everywhere you look. And it is everywhere you don’t look.

When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
-John O’Donohue

Practice what you preach. Better yet, stop preaching. And just be. No one wants to listen to preaching anyway. At least not for very long. And not over and over again. Even if they agree with you.

If you find you are well suited to repairing a small piece of the world that is broken, then by all means, go ahead. We need your services. We need fixers and healers of all shapes and sizes and colors.

But just in case I wasn’t clear, I’ll say it again.

Your job is to find beauty.

Your job is to seek it out, acknowledge it, share it, nurture it, photograph it, paint it, sculpt it, write about it, draw its name in the sand, scatter its petals over the ocean, light up the night sky with its fire.

As an artist, your job is also to create beauty. To be it. That is the birthright of each and every one of us. To acknowledge our own beauty. To become it. To look beneath the surface, to brush away the dust, to shake out the rugs.

We have stacked so much rubbish on top of ourselves, that our true beauty, and the beauty of everyone and everything are buried under our prejudices, our beliefs, our pages and pages of worn out stories. Dig yourself out. Brush yourself off. Throw away the never-ending manuscript of why you can’t.

The world is neither this thing nor that thing. It is not our ideas of how it is or of how it should be. The world is the world. Like love, the world contains all possibilities. All darks and lights, all ups and downs, all rainbows of doubt and joy, hardship and pleasure. But I want you to forget all that.

Your job is to find beauty.

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This is an excerpt from "Your Job Is to Find Beauty" - one of 66 essays in the Gold Nautilus Award winning collection, Happiness Is an Imaginary Line in the Sand.

The book is available here: https://bit.ly/40s3Gh0

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