On trusting beauty. And benevolent clouds

Do people get accustomed to beauty?
Do people get accustomed to ugliness, squalor and dreariness? To pain and disrespect?  
It is proven that we do get used to events, emotions, objects, tastes, people. It’s a defense mechanism that, for instance, allows us to survive when a beloved person dies. We think at first that the pain is unbearable and that we are not going to be able to live without that person, yet after a span of time (sometimes ages, yes), we get used to that hole in our soul and we go on. We know that the abyss is there and is not going to disappear. But we also realize that we still wake up every morning and we are demanded to live on. Paradoxically a consoling - though awkward - truth. The same way, however, we get used to exciting, beautiful and thrilling things, those we thought would guarantee a constant degree of happiness throughout our life, which, on the contrary, after a span of time, (sometimes ages, yes again) become bleak and flat. It seems like we always need “newness” and to overcome this natural (unfavorable?) impulse, a fair amount of endurance and self-control is required. I once read an excellent article about this phenomenon which struck me and surprisingly turned out to make my life easier.

I was thinking about that article again a few days ago, as man I know, who is a pilot, sent me a picture of a sunrise, taken from the cockpit. He is in cargo business, so he mostly flies at night, and lives what I picture to be an interesting, yet somehow strange life. Though it´s a life of status and many privileges, I imagine how it can be lonely too, at traits. Surely dark, let alone for the fact that he wakes up to go to the airport when most of the others are dreaming and rolling under their warm duvets.

Some time ago, in the middle of the night, the flying man sent me an astonishing photo depicting intense blue, fluffy clouds barely disclosing a timid emerging sun. “Gorgeous”, I thought, with a dash of envy, considering that – again – that night I, instead, had “only” slept and as I opened my eyes the marvelous spectacle that the friend witnessed while jetting goods around was already over. 
I considered that my pilot friend sees this every day. Day after day. So I wondered if it´s possible that he still feels, really feels, the poetry of it (or was he only trying to impress me, showing how cool sitting with a whole plane underneath your butt and the whole sky around you is?). Paraphrasing, is it possible to wake up next to your long-term partner, day after day, steal a glance at a body abandoned on a mattress to then think “is this really happening to me? Am I this lucky FOR REAL?!”? Or are we all doomed to just fall into a reassuring, mechanical habit, where the sparklers are mostly the one you lit up on New Year´s Eve while wishing for a different pinch of salt than the one you use to pep up an insipid meal?

I did ask to my captain friend if he still feels the power of the beauty he flies thorough every night, and reassuringly he answered “yes, of course!”. Sometimes, he added, he has the urge to take a picture of a cloud for its particular shape or nuance. And because this is precisely what I wanted to hear and because I am so sneaky, I immediately crafted an extended syllogism for which, yes, waking up next to your beloved after years can still be mesmerizing. 

It probably boils down to the simple truth: it depends on how you want to live. 

If you let beauty touch you.

If that be a question to me, I would vehemently exclaim that, yes, I am totally open for beauty to touch, caress, penetrate, permeate, even scratch me! I am ready to give beauty a pass-partout to my soul and to each and every of my senses. But can you open yourself up to beauty without granting free access to ugliness and evil as well? This (rhetorical) question kept bouncing in my head like in an old-time flipper a couple of nights ago as I was relishing some lovely, special attentions. Quite trivial special attentions, actually. Like gently and silently putting down my phone as I was attempting to find out, around 3 am, when my next train home would be. No words to tenderly ask “…what are you doing?!”. Something maybe ridiculously small and simple, which I noticed, however, left me astonished. It was like putting balm on a sore lip. Like wearing sunglasses on a bright sunny day. Like taking a shower after a long run and then let yourself fall on a soft bed bed with your damp robe still on.

It simply felt right. It made sense. 

Realizing this, I cursed against those moments and people that stole from me the pleasure of naturally trusting this goodness without questioning the authenticity of it. 

This is what we are called to do with beauty: we are naturally inclined to relish it, to let it fill us with its greatness, its inspiration. 

Nobody questions the intentions of a sunrise. 

You don´t doubt the authenticity of blue, fluffy clouds, even if they can turn into dangerous, potentially deadly storms.

I don´t know how much the flying man really felt the sunset he sent me. Or why he shared it with me, but no matter what, I see it as a good sign: I like people who believe in benevolent, magnificent clouds. 

savoir baiser

Some time ago I kissed a boy. To me, he was really just a boy though, in fact, for the society, a full grown up man. What can I say? Every male who is more than 4 years younger than me, to me, is a boy.

The boy and I inhabit different planets: he belongs to the skaters sub-culture, dropped out of college because “he makes his videos anyway, what could they possibly teach him at school?” and we have so little in common that it´s for me still quite inexplicable that we reciprocally found us funny and kind of liked each other. 

Fact is that the boy is, in a very uncommon way, sweet and pretty fascinating in his slightly arrogant yet somehow low key self-confidence. He loves to flirt and he seems to have a natural talent for that. 

Doubtlessly, he has a talent for  kissing. So, a late summer evening some weeks ago, this silly red fruit inexplicably found herself in a park, with the sun setting, kissing this boy.

For hours.

Nothing more and nothing less.

One beautiful and somehow forgotten pleasure; it was like being 14 again, blissfully enjoying the moment without thinking of any potential evolution of the situation. Since there wasn´t any possible evolution of the situation. 

Today I was thinking of the Synagogue in my town and I remembered that it was in front of that building that I met the boy the first time. And it made me think of the evening at the park. Though I will quite probably never see the boy again, the recollection made me smile, like a dreamy teenie. 

So, boys and men of the planet, I have a little suggestion: never, ever ever ever underevaluate the importance of the tiny, dazzling, simple things in life. 

And the importance of learning thoroughly - and never unlearn - to kiss well.  

So this is how it works

This is how it works / You're young until you're not / You love until you don't
You try until you can't / You laugh until you cry / You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe / Until their dyin' breath

No, this is how it works / You peer inside yourself / You take the things you like
Then try to love the things you took

And then you take that love you made / And stick it into some / Someone else's heart
Pumpin' someone else's blood

And walking arm in arm / You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does / You'll just do it all again

(ReginaSpektor)

So this is how it works. You start breathing again when suddenly you get the feeling that you are not alone with your thoughts, that even if you have the wrong job or maybe the wrong non-friends, the wrong environment and you were starting to believe that after all lots of people live the same ´wrongness´ so maybe you should get used to that, there are other people, hidden behind well-known faces, who are not as unresolved as you thought but just powerfully themselves. People with ideas, and with loads of words and with smiles and an incredible lust for life. It is such an exciting discovery that you start loading up like a rechargeable battery which has finally found the recharging dock. 

You start breathing again when you feel that the somehow hackneyed motto that we all should do more what we love and less what we think we should do is not necessarily a trendy empty slogan because there are people who do that, and they are normal: they have families and responsibilities and apartments to clean and jobs to pay the bills but, still, they unabashedly go their way. This sighting is at the same time thrilling and destabilizing, because, like in Lucio Fontana´s works, it rips the canvass and then you are forced to look beyond the slit. 

That´s when, instead of just blissfully breathing, you start panting a little, because you realize that what you have to do now is learn to just shut your mouth up when all you are capable of saying is how you are sure that you are being screwed and how this is not how you want life to treat you. And, instead of handing out invites to your pity-party, you start to really enjoy the moment. Even the silly, apparently meaningless, surely somehow wrong moments. Above all them. Because maybe, just maybe, these silly, apparently meaningless and surely somehow wrong moments when you are being screwed by life or by a beautiful semi-stranger are the ones which teach you something you finally need to learn. 

Like maybe to be less worried and more alive and enthusiastic.

And thereby relish the greatness of endless possibilities. Or just the greatness of life.

This is ultimately what freedom is, right?