I recently came across a tagline for an interior design business which captures an idea I’ve been pondering for some time now. It read, simply, Creating beauty, Changing lives. Of course the reference to the very commercial enterprise of marketing home furnishings is blatant, but it also speaks to the idea that the presence of Beauty, in it’s purest sense, can add deep and immeasurable value in our lives—beyond the surface appearance of things. The Creation of Beauty in one sense has been a central theme in my professional life as a commercial photographer charged with beautifying everything from sanitary napkins to pet food. Then of course there was all the more obvious beauty when I had a choice of subject matter. Did I feel I was changing lives? Hardly. But the pursuit and creation of beauty as an ongoing theme in my life has been hugely enriching, something I’ve often taken for granted. Now with a little distance from the commercial aspect of it, and as I dive deeper into the study of the nature of it, I see the call to Beauty as an essential core value in all of our lives moving forward—as a way of being, as a philosophy, as a grounding principle. I’ve touched on this in previous posts here.

©Elizabeth Watt

Huge trade-offs have been made in the unprecedented advance of technology, efficiency and productivity due to lack of attention to Beauty. With what-it-means-to-be-human being reinvented at an ever accelerating pace, we are looking for new frameworks for living our best lives, being our best selves. Our ways of approaching the world need to be informed by different values. How can Beauty be reclaimed, as per the Greeks, who held it equal to truth and goodness? How to separate and articulate the term from so many current shallow associations—where we are suffering from a poverty of discernment, where the media generates relentless images of mediocrity and ugliness, enshrining it as the norm, and where many of our built environments lack grace and spirit? The wonderful contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton speaks to this often and states: “One way evil reaches us is through ugliness”— something to ponder.

How can we apprentice ourselves to beauty?

Beauty is not a luxury. Real Beauty is not glamour per se; rather an invitation to order, coherence and unity…available to everyone in any situation. And whereas Beauty indeed is in the eyes of the beholder, there are centuries’ old standards informed and shared by cultures all over the world. We can only be enriched by integrating a certain amount of discipline around reconnecting with those standards, in large and small ways, internally and externally, daily. When we experience the beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming.