Answers: What pleases you aesthetically?
Why Experiencing Beauty is Important to Resilience
We perceive and appreciate Beauty with our senses, hearts, minds, and spirits. Qualities of Beauty – including form, creativity, appreciation, and splendor – evoke awe and wonder and are multi-dimensional in nature, the arts, the sciences, in individuals, and within human connections. Beauty can be subtle or striking. It can be found internally and in our exterior world. It can be plain and simple or elegant, colorful, and complex. Wherever and however we find Beauty, it moves us, often deeply. It invites us out of ourselves to connect with a deeper reality. It also awakens us, strengthens us, gives us courage, and thus cultivates greater resilience. An encounter with Beauty also often inspires hope and spurs forward movement.
Any great artwork … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world … —Leonard Bernstein
Without a Strong Appreciation of Beauty …
Without strong, positive awareness and appreciation of and connection to Beauty … the world around you may appear dark, devoid of light, as well as delight and joy. This can create conditions for self-pity and negative predispositions.
Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. —Rumi
Action Planning
If you want to develop your awareness and appreciation of Beauty further … be intentional about seeking out beauty in nature, the arts, science, and in your connections with others.
Possible Actions – Perceive & Ponder
- Take a moment to pause next time you are struck by beauty and pay attention to what is stirring within you.
- Contemplate the source of all that is beautiful (or the source of beauty).
Possible Actions – Engage & Connect
- Take a moment to pause next time you are struck by beauty and pay attention to what is stirring within you.
- Contemplate the source of all that is beautiful (or the source of beauty).
Possible Actions – Plan & Pursue
- Intentionally increase time spent surrounded by natural beauty (go for hikes, sit quietly on your back porch, gaze out the window during work breaks, etc.).
- Find ways to connect with and express beauty (photography, art museums, walks in nature, study of, physics, and other natural sciences, greater awareness of beauty in the people around you).
In a lot of ways, art is a demonstration of resilience. Art in the spirit of making, in the spirit of creating — it’s like the closest thing to joy. They always say laughter is the best medicine. Well, so is joy. —Nehemiah Dixon III, Phillips Collection
