How Beauty is Saving a Friend
Over coffee, we cut loose on the stuff of life: the news; marriage; children; art; the journey into or out of faith as the case may be. We talked about the creeping despair in America, too, how I’d had two acquaintances who’d passed in the last 14 days, perhaps by their own hands. “Precarity,” he said, “is baked into everything these days: the economy; the ways we make money as freelancers; the family; life.”
I rolled his statement over again, played it back in my head. Precarity. That’s an apt way to put it.
He looked at his camera (a camera that he loves and I covet), then said, “This thing might have saved my life.” The pursuit of art opened his eyes to the beautiful stuff of the world, to the people staring down the barrel of his lens. He collects those people, those places, those tiny snapshots of life and considers them, smiles at them, sometimes posts them on Instagram for others. It’s this art that serves as a hedge against his own despair, against the precarity that is the genesis of that despair.
Can beauty save the world as St. John Paul II and Dostoyevsky’s idiot claimed? Maybe not. But it can save a middle-aged man or two. And these days, that’s enough for me.
Life Examined: Curating Beauty
Are you practicing your own artistic curation somewhere? Are you resisting despair through beauty? I create photography (and sometimes share it online).
Grab a Copy and Wake Up
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP —a book on addiction, attachment, and the Divine Love—launched TUESDAY so order a copy or ten at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookish (my favorite indie bookseller). Then, forward this post to a friend and ask them to read along.