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Bath in beauty

Bath in beauty

作者: 此锅非本锅 | 来源:发表于2021-12-19 14:43 被阅读0次

Bathing in beauty can help to calm and cleanse you.

On February 23, 1944, Anne Frank climbed up to the attic space above the annex in which her family lived in hiding. She and Peter, a boy who lived with them and was also Jewish, sat at her favorite spot on the floor. They looked through a small window at the world from which they were shut away. Looking at a bright blue sky, the chestnut tree below them, and birds diving through the air, the two were entranced. Later, Anne would write in her diary that as long as sunshine and cloudless skies existed, she couldn’t possibly be sad.

Anne Frank wrote that, even during misfortune, beauty remains. If you look for it, you can find happiness.

It’s no coincidence that the beauty sustaining Anne and Peter came from nature; when it comes to basking in the kind of true beauty that gives us peace and strength, there’s no place quite like the natural world.

There is a concept in Japan called shinrin yoku, or “forest bathing.” It’s a kind of therapy that uses nature to heal spiritual woes, not unlike, as we talked about in an earlier blink, Kennedy finding stillness in the White House’s Rose Garden during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Of course, it isn’t always possible to take regular forest baths ourselves. Those of us who dwell in cities may have less inspiring immediate surroundings, and can’t always retreat to the wilderness in search of beauty. But if we can attune ourselves to less obvious manifestations of beauty, we begin to see it everywhere.

That was the case for Roman philosopher and emperor Marcus Aurelius. Often seen as a dark and depressive Stoic, Marcus Aurelius wrote vividly of finding beauty in the ordinary. He talked of how bread splits as it bakes, and its cracks catch our eye and stir appetite within us.

He even found beauty in death. We should, he wrote, come gracefully to our final resting place, falling as a ripened olive might: grateful to the tree that gave it life and growth.

So no matter where you find yourself, take inspiration from Marcus Aurelius and Anne Frank and simply notice the beauty around you. The stillness that you find there may be a rarely appreciated phenomenon in most of our lives. But there is an inexhaustible supply of it in the world. You just need to take a moment to look.

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