The Extraordinary Value of Everyday Beauty
Excerpted from her just-released book, Preaching Happiness: Creating a Just and Joyful World
One summery Saturday morning, I pulled a beautiful shawl from a cardboard box across the street. The box was part of a massive free pile—table after table laden with treasures from my friend Mandy’s life. Mandy loved nature, children, and beauty, so there were animals in all shapes, sizes, and textures, from books to bubble blowers. Children’s toys, delicate napkins, and the prettiest of notecards. I chose the shawl to remember Mandy, who died when she could not handle any more pain and took matters into her own hands.
I knew about Mandy’s lifelong struggles, and I was aware that both children and nature were safe refuges for her, but I didn’t realize how much beauty mattered to Mandy until her memorial service. For her, beauty was healing, a balm to her battered soul. Whether it was the spectacular patterns of frost on a winter window, or a carefully color-coordinated outfit, Mandy sought out everyday beauty like a sunflower leaning toward the sun.
Mandy may have carried more pain than most, but, just as all flowers need the sun, all humans need beauty. And we can certainly use all the extra healing we can find these days! I like the way Italian therapist Piero Ferrucci describes it. In his book, Beauty and the Soul: The Extraordinary Power of Everyday Beauty to Heal Your Life, he writes that “Beauty is not like a distant satellite, but like a sun that gives life and light to all areas of our life.”
To better understand how important beauty is to us individually, to feel that sun that gives light and life, you can join me in a little experiment. Close your eyes and remember a moment of beauty you’ve experienced. Anything from a wildflower poking up through the cement to first touching a new baby’s toes. Any beautiful moment will do. When you’ve found one, try to drink it all in—textures, colors, aromas, sounds—to make the experience in this moment as full-bodied as possible.
Do you feel how that moment, even now, nurtures you? Does it make you smile? Are you suffused with love, gratitude, or contentment?
It is, I imagine, life affirming.
Now, envision that there is no longer any beauty. No colors, no beautiful words; no music, no seascapes. No beauty at all. Anywhere.
That concept arouses such negative emotions for me, I can’t even do this part of the exercise. A life without beauty is too bleak to comprehend. We may not need beauty the same way we need air, water, and food—that is, to exist at all. But without beauty, would life be worth living?
Fortunately, as the Navajo prayer “Walking in Beauty” reminds us, we are surrounded by beauty: “Beauty is before me, and Beauty behind me, above me and below me hovers the beautiful … I am immersed in it…. In beauty it is begun. In beauty, it is ended.”
“Seek Not Afar for Beauty,” a song from the Unitarian Universalist hymnal, underscores the point that life overflows with everyday beauty: “Seek not afar for beauty; lo, it glows in dew-wet grasses all about your feet, in birds, in sunshine, childish faces sweet, in stars and mountain summits topped with snows.” So readily available, yet easy to miss.
There are also times when beauty is neither ordinary nor possible to ignore. Beauty overwhelmed me one memorable evening, when I was driving a rental car alone through the Florida panhandle wilderness, not at all confident that I was headed in the right direction. I was sick the night before and slept very little. With ginger ale, crackers, and willpower, I had pulled myself together enough to get to the rental agency in Tampa where I refused to buy extra insurance on the car. Now, in the wilderness, shaky, maybe lost, I was increasingly worried about wrecking the car, or worse. I was close to panicking.
Yet high above me was a wildly spectacular sunset. The sky in all directions was alive with vivid pinks, purples, oranges, reds, and blues. It was surreal. I hung onto that sunset as though it were a life raft—until darkness closed in. I was still two long hours away from my destination. That was plenty of time to damage the car by running over a curb (which I did do). The sunset didn’t solve all my problems, but it temporarily eased my troubled mind. I can still conjure it up whenever I want, just by closing my eyes.
Beauty clearly matters. Yet, I believe its importance in our lives is given short shrift, on both the personal and policymaking levels. While there is some consideration for beauty in, say, national parks, beauty doesn’t show up in the most commonly used metric about our collective well-being, the Gross Domestic Product. As Bobby Kennedy observed back in 1968, the GDP measures everything but that which makes life worth living—like beauty. Nor do policy makers who propose selling off public lands seem concerned about access to beauty for all citizens, regardless of income. Even the Gross National Happiness system so far neglects the importance of beauty. But GNH measurements are still being developed in the U.S. and worldwide—maybe beauty will get more notice.
Positive psychology, on the other hand, has long noted that beauty is crucial to well-being. Indeed, the capacity to appreciate beauty is one of positive psychology’s twenty-four universally admired character strengths.
According to the VIA Institute on Character, those who rank high as appreciators of beauty and excellence, “notice and appreciate beauty, excellence and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.” The VIA says the benefits can include feeling energized and elevated, as well as having a desire to be better, a sense of awe and wonder, and admiration.
At the same time, beauty has a dark side—like obsessions to possess art masterpieces and hide them away, or to collect beautiful people as personal trophies, or to monopolize natural vistas for one’s personal enjoyment.
Then there’s the omnipresent pressure to be personally beautiful, which exacts a horrifying toll exemplified by eating disorders, body shaming, and billions spent on cosmetics. An article in The Atlantic, “The Beauty-Happiness Connection,” shared a Yale study which made me cringe because it concluded “that being beautiful adds to one’s overall life happiness … [because] prettier people tend to make more money, and it is this financial leg up that affords beautiful people great happiness.”
That’s how we see beauty? As a way to make more money?
The pressure to be beautiful is interwoven in our culture in so many ways, including how we compliment children. I’ve met many parents who push back against the way their young daughters are constantly being lauded as “so pretty!” as if that is what matters most about the girls. Yet even for such diligent parents, I think the beauty bias is so pervasive, it’s sometimes invisible. I once attended a family concert featuring a soprano whose voice is the very definition of beauty. She sang a delightful version of the “Ugly Duckling.” I enjoyed her performance until I suddenly heard what the story was all about. In this version, even the duckling’s mother abandons her child because it isn’t beautiful enough! All the creatures pick on the ugly duckling until, amazingly, it transforms into a beautiful swan. Then, voila! The animals are all in awe of the physically transformed bird. Sorry to be a killjoy, but this is NOT a fun story. The duckling is never valued for its inner beauty. And worse, the ugly duckling is black, while the beautiful swan is white.
One look at Hollywood’s leading ladies and gents provides strong evidence that our society prefers to see beautiful white people on the screen. This preference may be shifting, at least internationally. In December 2019, The New York Times reported that all five major international beauty pageants—including Miss USA and Miss America— had most recently been won by black women. I’m not a big fan of beauty contests, but that seems to indicate a growing diversification in beauty ideals.
Not only beauty standards but also access to everyday beauty are likely limited by race. Greater Good Magazine republished a 2005 article by Jonathan Kozol called “Schools Without Beauty.” Kozol discusses inner city schools where, he says, “the insult to aesthetics, the affront to cleanliness and harmony and sweetness, are continuing realities … for children who must go each morning into morbid-looking buildings in which few adults other than their teachers would agree to work day after day.” In one elementary school, Kozol observed:
The principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage bag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. “This,” he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair … “would not happen to white children.”
“There is no misery index for the children of apartheid education,” Kozol says, but “There ought to be; we measure almost every other aspect of the lives they lead in school. Do kids who go to schools like these enjoy the days they spend in them? Is school, for most of them, a happy place to be?” I think we all know the answer to that.
I don’t doubt for a moment that children of color are all too often steered into schools in need of serious repair and fresh paint jobs, but I don’t think they are the only kids treated this way. A teacher friend of mine says the same is true of small-town schools, rural schools, and poor schools. She’s seen the same kinds of problems Kozol writes about: missing ceiling tiles, mold, water leaking on teacher’s desks, classrooms with no windows and not much heat. The teachers’ rooms in these schools, too, she says, are filthy and dingy. Perhaps it’s affluent school districts that are set apart.
The good news is that beauty’s dark side is not actually the fault of beauty itself. The warped views of beauty and the neglect are man-made constructs and we can reject them – to our own benefit. Piero Ferrucci suggests:
In this amazing and frightening era, institutions are losing their force and can no longer help us. The values of justice, freedom, and love are becoming abstract and distant, outshone by the lure of a thousand seductive promises. In such a critical situation, beauty can be a lifesaver – because it is all around us, if we know how to find it. It is beyond any dogma. It is immediate and spontaneous. It can be the way back to ourselves.
And Beauty for All founder John de Graaf suggested something similar in a 2019 speech. He said, “In spite of its great wealth, its growing economy and its low unemployment rate, America is unhappy, angry, and polarized to a degree I cannot remember in my entire 72 years on this planet.” He suggested that only a sense of shared values, like beauty, can “fully soothe the ill will or smooth out the conflict.”
So much can be done, on the outside, creating more healing beauty across the country. Across many countries. Each of us can better advocate for and benefit from public policy advancements that promote beauty in homes, neighborhoods, parks, public lands, classrooms, and shopping areas. We can do this by working together, but also individually by cultivating a greater internal awareness and appreciation of beauty as a key contributor to our happiness.
In my research on beauty, it was an unexpected pleasure to learn that neuropsychologist Rick Hanson recommends exactly that—cultivating our relationship with beauty for greater happiness. He says beauty “actually changes the brain. It alters brain wave patterns when we do respond to something as beautiful, taking us to a place of relaxation, as well as happiness.” That beauty, he says, is everywhere, even inside of us. He urges, “See if you can find even some of the beauty inside yourself and when you do … give yourself over to it…. Even the breath, the breath is beautiful. You can breathe in beauty, and you can let beauty breathe you."
Experiencing beauty need not be grand to be powerful, to be healing, or to make us happy. We need only look around. Yes, we can work to enhance and preserve beauty for the happiness of all. At the same time, the extraordinary value of everyday beauty is there for each of us, just as the sun is there for sunflowers.
Ginny Sassaman is a co-founder and immediate past president of Gross National Happiness USA. She created the Happiness Paradigm as a platform for teaching, writing about and advocating for greater personal happiness and creating systems change for maximum well-being for all. Since 2013, she has served as a lay preacher in Unitarian Universalist churches on these topics; a book of 16 of these sermons, called Preaching Happiness: Creating a Just and Joyful World, will be published in May 2020. Ginny also prioritizes time with family, friends, community, and being in nature. She is deeply committed to helping individuals learn how to lead more joyful and productive lives, for their own benefit and for greater societal well being.