“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty ever grows old.”

— Franz Kafka

Beauty lies all around us; but we often miss it because of our preconceived notions of what makes something beautiful.  Every day, especially in ads designed to sell us something, we are told which traits we should define as beautiful and which ones we should hide or eradicate or call ugly.  We are told that youth is beautiful and that the sags and wrinkles that come with age are to be avoided.  We are told that the colorful flowers we cultivate in the name of beauty are to be valued and celebrated, but the weeds that grow next to them are to be removed in order to maintain a beautiful environment.

Growing old is an unavoidable part of our life cycle.  The only remedy is to die young; and I have met very few people who consider that a better idea.  Perhaps we can remain young our whole lives by learning, before confronted by our own wrinkled faces, to see the beauty in the order that creates all of life.  How can we practice, while we still are young, the art of seeing beauty wherever we turn?

No one would deny the beauty of a sweet, newborn baby.  Nobody would deny the beauty of seeing the twinkle in the eyes of young lovers when they first discover one another.  These tender moments call forth emotions that we hold dear in our memories.  Perhaps that is what makes us long to hold onto the beauty of youth and use it as the gold standard for what we call beautiful.

What we miss, if we limit our view to these superficial definitions, is the beauty of the order and cycles of all of life.  We miss the poignant beauty in the dull-colored seed pod that replaces the fallen flower– brown and gray and dry and lifeless, yet containing the seeds that carry the magical beauty of the next generation.  We forget that the black clouds that hide the brilliant blue of the sky are the very ones that carry the rain and assure that life on our planet will go on.  We must learn to see the intrinsic beauty that is the very substance of all of creation.  When we can feel the same passion for the newborn baby and for the withered hand of the great-grandmother who tenderly reaches out to touch its new life; when we can see the same beauty in the bountiful color of summer and the last breath of autumn; when we can see that each weed has a purpose that adds to the beauty of the order of life in our universe; then, perhaps, we will discover that we never grow old.  Age, after all, is a relative concept; and amid the eternal beauty of the universe, we truly are young.  How beautiful it is just to be a millisecond in the order that is eternity.