To really experience beauty, one needs to truly be alone and present with themselves and their surroundings. Distractions need to be silenced and you have to let yourself just be and soak in all that is around you.
For me, being alone and taking time to experience the beauty in this world is critical to my overall mental health. As much as I love spending time with people and doing things with others, I find that having time to experience the world through my own lens, uninterrupted, somehow grounds me. It recharges me and reconnects me to my purpose and why I am here.
Another way to look at seeing beauty alone is through our own, unique memories. Only we can truly capture those moments and really feel what they meant to us. And it’s my little, innocuous memories that allow me to re-experience the beauty, as well as the feeling in my soul I had at that time. And those feelings…are comforting to me.
For whatever reason, in writing this, the beauty my souls feels is a memory of spending many summer days in my aunt’s pool when I was a teenager. I feel the water glide across my skin and the sensation of chlorine going up my nose, accompanied by a slight pain in my throat. It is dusk and the New England air has cooled, and I feel the contrast in temperature of the air and pool water as I climb the ladder to reach the wood deck. I hear my mom and aunt talking about work in the distance and the sound of the bug zapper that has just been turned on at my house, which was right next door.
While someone reading this may be able to put themselves there in that point of time with me, it is impossible for them to experience what I do because they never experienced it to begin with. They don’t have context or an idea of what that point in time means to me. They can’t experience the simplicity and beauty of it because they just don’t have the same connection to it. Just like I can’t absorb 100% of the beauty that their memories bring them.
Our memories offer us each the ability for our soul to experience beauty that no other soul can. This beauty is unique to us.
What beauty does your soul see?
