The little things are, as their name indicates, small, sometimes inconspicuous – a trouser button, a door handle, a word, or even smaller, the decorated edge of a trouser button, the shape and the colour of the door handle, a single letter in the word – and since they are little, they are normally overlooked. By the user, the passerby, not by the manufacturer. He gives a lot of attention and creativity to those little things of our world. By saying so, I don’t want to assert that all little things have to be beautiful but most of them are!
Thus, it’s worth gazing at those little things like a child.
As a child, things were bigger for me, time longer, spaces and distances larger than today. Today, I would have to live with a magnifier in my eyes, with decelerator and extensions.
It is about pausing and gazing at the little things, in detail, from all angles, perspectives. To take them in your hands, taste them with your lips, to use all five senses to elicit their beauty, their glance, their story, elicit them from the banality to be overlooked or to remain dominated, taken in as the part of a bigger whole.
Even an ugly dress can have nice buttons, even an angry person is decorated by bushy eyebrows. As a rose is beautiful, I forget to gaze at the wonderfully plainly shaped spikes.
What do we gain from gazing at the little things?
We are surrounded by beauty! No matter where we are on this world!
Though the bigger whole may sometimes seem daunting, ugly, destructive, there are beautiful things hidden in it. Even the garbage contains beauty!
Art of Life doesn’t call the ugly beautiful but sees something beautiful in the ugly and thus changes it!
We are surrounded by beauty.
Even though it might be paving stones, grains of sand, blades of grass, raindrops …
The little things beam like pearls, they are everywhere.
Let’s notice them and be touched.
This search for beauty doesn’t deny the evil, the ugly, the destructive in this world. It is about the uprising of the beauty, about the light in the dark.
And there is still one thing to happen, whereto the little things take us, appreciation and gratefulness will arise, for the inventors, manufacturers, designers, hardworking hands that are behind the little things, whether it is God or a human being.
I receive a letter, the miracle that paper exists, I see the image of the entire written text, its form, its order, the lines. I marvel at the language, at the different languages of this world, at the words. Every dot has a meaning.
If the letter is handwritten, I recognize the writing, single letters are unique, individually shaped, consciously, experienced.
Worlds open themselves, fill my daily life.
Naturally, I normally take an interest in the content of the letter first, but not always first, also the exterior, how it is folded, the face e.g. catch my eye, the colour of the ink.
We are surrounded by beauty by little things.
What is the price?
Art of Life costs time. I need peace and time to pause in the moment, to dwell on the little things.
But what else do we normally do, how much time, how much money, how much energy do we often spend for a smile, for some warmth that actually surround us all the time in the beauty of the small things.
Art of Life Exercise:
To calmly gaze at a “little thing” – an object, gesture, act, a relationship – every day, to change perspectives, with all senses.
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Consciously make a “little thing” light up as a pearl in a group, together with others, appreciate it in front of others, make it beam also for the others.
I thanked the trees that presented fruits to my life but failed to reremember the grass that always kept it green.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Indian poet and philosopher, 1913 Nobel prize in literature
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