Can We Really Find Beauty in Every Moment?

You know, sometimes you hear ideas for many years and read about them, but they remain abstract for a long time, or at best, semi-pragmatic bits of wisdom. A good example for me was/is mindfulness. This is my account of how the idea of mindfulness and everyday beauty became clearer to me.  

I recently finished reading a biography of Agnes Martin, by Arne Glimcher. Agnes Martin, was a prolific Canadian American painter. Based on what i have studied about her, she was quirky and dedicated to her art. Perhaps “dedicated” wont do the justice, she was super dedicated, she painted till she was 92. She was a minimalist abstract expressionist. 

In Arne’s book, which by the way is an amazing book & I highly recommend, there is an abundance of interesting lines and tidbits about her thought process & philosophy. But one thing that is right now on top of my mind is Agnes's speech in the University of New Mexico in 1979 . My theory is that in that particular speech, she explained the intertwined idea of beauty and mindfulness better than any Zen teacher. 

There are several beautiful ideas in that 1979 speech, on how she is thinking about beauty, mindfulness and awareness, here are a couple of them, she says: 

Confusion is due to our lack of awareness of real happiness. Happiness is pervasive. It is everywhere. And everywhere the same and it is forever.

Happiness is unattached. Always the same. It does not appear and disappear. It is not sometimes more and sometimes less. It is our awareness of happiness. That goes up and down. Happiness is our real condition. It is reality. it is life.

These lines fascinated me because I felt that she is about to crack open something important. And I was curious to learn more. Then she has another sentence that is really captivating, she says, the wiggle of a worm is as the same importance as the most important political events, I'm paraphrasing here.  

Then I thought how can I actually test this out? so on a dog walk, as I was going up on our routine afternoon walk, which is up a hill, I thought, let's just for a moment look at the trees, the green, the yellow and the orange leaves, the buildings behind the trees, the dog leash in my hand, and imagine this moment is really the same as the other things that I might highly desire. 

Here by the ‘sameness of events’ I mean first lets imagine how one would feel if they win the Nobel prize, how that very moment feels, and project it on this dog walk. Then something strange and wonderful happened. In that moment, I felt the joyful pulse of life radiating from the trees, leaves, and buildings around me, overwhelming in the most beautiful way.  

This experiment contrasted with how I used to understand mindfulness, where I felt there was an imperative to enjoy every moment. I think there are some caveats. First, you need to have the privilege of pausing, to be able to take that break and refocus. Second, you have to be able to apply the idea of sameness to the moment at hand. It’s possible, but maybe not always meaningful to do so. The good thing is, I now have a more pragmatic sense of how to approach it.