Do you enjoy "useless" beauty?

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Perhaps beautiful experiences seem useless. You tell yourself you're a doer and they don't help you get things done. What's the point with beauty anyways?

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Beauty doesn't pay the bills.

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Yet there is something unspeakably significant about simply enjoying beautiful things, art, and moments.

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Learn to prioritize sitting in wonder. Enjoy curiously exploring the world around you. Practice sitting with the sensations of the moment.
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If you want to grow in deepening your presence, prioritize beautiful experiences.
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To improve your listening and intimacy skills, delightfully drink in captivating sights and sounds.
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If you are too busy to slow down and be present, you're too busy to grow in maturity. You may be more productive, and action has its value. It's important to work hard, compete, and seek to be secure. But more profound ways of seeing ourselves and others are coaxed forward through silence and beauty.

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If you don't have the intimacy you want, grow your capacity to sit in awe.
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Deep presence is a shy creature and will not come into the open if you are in too much of a hurry.
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What seems useless in our modern world of hurry can be alive with value.

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Quotes

"We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed, and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."

​Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

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"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

​Thoughts in Solitude, by Thomas Merton

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Endnote

The degree to which you slow down and practice noticing and appreciating beauty, combined with virtue, is the capacity to experience deep intimacy.

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Live wisely,
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Josh

P.S. Did you enjoy this? If so, pass along a good word about Words of Wisdom to your people.

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