Hey, Good Lookin’! Whatcha Got Cookin’!
Daily Meditation #362–2/21/2023
Beauty is everywhere.
The dancing of the shadows of the leaves on your wall in the morning light.
How the winds effortlessly sculp liquid-esque ripples of dunes.
The creeping moss filling in the centuries-old chiselwork across ancient cemetaries, stones lined up in orderly, file cabinet rows, each with a box beneath them enclosed around a legacy.
The way stars creep across the sky, horizon to horizon, each gloaming evening into the glowering dawn, moving so slowly, so gradually we cannot even perceive their motions.
Beauty IS everywhere.
And many of us are quite beautiful (conventionally speaking).
Yet our physical beauty adds very little of substance to the world. It serves to attract a mate, like a beautiful peacock, a vibrant cardinal, or a handsomely furred fox, but really, being beautiful is so fleeting.
And we should not cling to it.
We should aim to be fluid in our self-definition of our beauty as aging is completely inevitable.
Just like the stars moving imperceptibly across the jet of night sky, so too will age creep in around us.
Yesterday you may have no grey hair.
Today, too.
Maybe even tomorrow and the next day, as well.
But one day, you’ll look up and there it will be — all the single days you didn’t have it gone.
What do you do?
What should you do?
We should be understanding of the fluid nature of our beauty, just as beauty is fluid in nature.
Does a tree lament for its peeling, ancient bark and drying limbs? Pine away for its sapling days?
No, it grows, does its duty and then dies, fulfilling a new and equally beautiful duty of serving as nutrition for the next generation and a home for countless new animals on the forest floor.
You maybe were beautiful at 18.
Maybe you’re beautiful, now.
And you’ll still be beautiful at 50. 67. 82. 100.
You may simply be differently beautiful.
And that’s okay.
It’s inevitable.
So go with the flow, and be flexible.
The days are long but the years are short.
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
