Is life beautiful?

This article is an answer to the following question sent to me by a client:

How can I become aware of the beauty of life despite worries, work, fear and stress?
How can I keep calm and create space for the beauty of life / the calm of being?
Or maybe what I really want to ask is: Is life beautiful?

Life is a purely psychological experience. Because of this, the question whether life is beautiful can’t be answered in a general way. For some people, life is beautiful, and for others it isn’t, and this has nothing to do with their respective life circumstances.
Two friends can have identical life circumstances (the same work, the same age, the same circle of acquaintances, and both might live in the same street), and one of them experiences life as beautiful, while the other one perceives it to be dismal.

Why is that so?

Because beauty is a subjective perception, an inner experience.

And even someone who perceives life to be beautiful, will not always perceive it so - we have moods, which means that we feel better in some moments and in others we feel worse. When we are feeling good, life appears to be more beautiful, when we are feeling bad, it appears to be more ugly.

Did you ever notice that you perceive life as beautiful when you are feeling good?

When you are feeling good (relaxed, peaceful, happy, present), you see beauty in other people, beauty in nature, you see how lucky you have been in your life, and you easily find reasons to be grateful.

And when you are feeling bad (worried, stressed, anxious, angry), you see threats in other people, you see insanity in nature, you see how much misfortune you had in your life, and you easily find reasons to be disappointed.

So, if you want to be more aware of the beauty of life, you first have to understand that life doesn’t exist “out there”, outside of yourself. Life is always only your unique, inner experience. And for this reason, life is always only as beautiful or ugly as your present inner state.

Your question “how can I keep calm?” reveals that you already understand this to some extent. It seems you noticed that life is more beautiful when you are calm inside.

“Keep calm!” is also always the first advice for emergency situations - not “freak out!” or “start to panic!”. This is because when we are calm inside, we function better, think more clearly and act more appropriately.

But how to find this calm now, and how to keep it?

To learn this, it is helpful to first understand how the opposite of calm - let’s call it restlessness - is being created.

Where does restlessness come from?

Restlessness arises every time I think about something restless and stressed. What it is I am thinking about doesn't matter - it can be a task at work just as well as a childhood experience, it can be something my partner said, or it can be a political event. The content of my thinking is completely interchangeable.

What matters is how I think. Is my thinking stressful, desperate, depressed, nervous? Or calm, harmonious, clear?

We all have an infallible feedback-mechanism built into our system, which informs us about how we are thinking: Our feelings.

If I want to know whether my thinking is moving in a positive direction (that is, a direction which brings me closer to the beauty of life), or in a negative direction (a direction which carries me away from the beauty of life), I only have to ask myself what I am feeling in this moment. When I am feeling fear, stress, worry, it means my thinking is going “down”. When I am feeling calm, joy, clarity, it means my thinking is going “up”.

Wenn I feel that my thinking is going down, I can simply stop engaging with it. When I do that, I am not giving any more energy to it and it will move on soon. And when it has moved on, I automatically find myself in a better feeling.

The good feeling always comes to the surface as soon as my gloomy thinking has moved on - like the blue sky, which is always there behind the clouds and becomes visible again as soon as they move on.

What makes this whole thing difficult is that we simply can’t believe that it actually works this way. We cling to the idea that, in order to get into a better feeling, we first have to get to grips with the problems that our gloomy thinking is showing us.

The thinking might say for example: “You have to get this task at work done first, then you can relax! There is just so little time, how are ever going to manage that? Why do I always get assigned so much? Why is my life so dreadful?”

When we have no understanding of how the beauty and the ugliness of life are being created, it will seem right and responsible to engage with these thoughts - after all, we have to get our task done and our thinking is propelling us to do so.

When we do have an understanding of how the beauty and the ugliness of life are being created (namely: in us, in this moment), it will seem right and responsible to us to not engage with these thoughts - after all, we want to get our task done, and have an agreeable experience all the while, and our stressful thinking is getting in the way of both of these things.

Yes, in the way of both things. Because, as the phrase “keep calm” reveals, a clear mind and a good feeling are the optimal preconditions to accomplish the task at hand in the best possible way.

Understanding is key

So, if you want to experience the beauty of life more of the time, also in your day-to-day life with its many duties and appointments, then you have to understand more deeply, where this beauty is coming from.

Understand more deeply that the only thing which can hide the beauty of life from you is a veil of ugly thinking, which floats through your mind in this moment.

Understand more deeply that you are perfectly equipped to evaluate the quality of your thinking, because you can notice your feeling.

And understand more deeply that there is no meaningful information in ugly thinking. That means you can allow yourself to not further engage with it, which in turn will ensure that it will move on, sooner or later.

The more deeply you understand these things, the faster will the ugly thinking move on. And when it has moved on, the beauty of life is shining in you again - the beauty that is always there in the background, in the core of your existence.