As we all know, the world desperately needs beauty-bringers who offer clean pleasure to others in every human endeavor, including relationships, art and design, business, politics, finances, and much more. By “clean pleasure,” I mean virtuous, life and health-bringing pleasure as opposed to depraved, death and decay-dealing pleasure.
For example, relational beauty-bringers offer clean, virtuous, life and health-bringing pleasure in the way they relate to others. They do this by affirming others’ intrinsic, God-given dignity and value. As a result, they’re considerate, patient, gentle, kind, and honest, even when assertively correcting or disagreeing with others.
Financial beauty-bringers offer clean, virtuous, life and health-bringing pleasure in the way they steward their own and/or others financial resources. They do this by affirming that all resources are gifts to be managed, not exploited or idolized. As a result, they offer wisdom, integrity, and humility in financial matters.
Art and design beauty-bringers offer clean, virtuous, life and health-bringing pleasure to others through what they create and in the way they conduct themselves throughout the creative process. They do so by creating aesthetic solutions that uniquely meet client (even if the client is themselves) priorities, values, and stories. This applies to creators who create with wood, paint, artistic design software, hairstyling tools and products, fabric, shrubbery and trees, building materials, musical notes, food, merchandising, and much, much more.
Oh, that the world would be filled with such beauty-bringers!
On that note, how might WE grow as beauty-bringers? I’m glad you asked! Perhaps a good place to begin is with a simple, axiomatic metaphor: We must be beauty-breathers to be beauty-bringers. Since breathing implies both inhaling and exhaling, we might go one step further and say that we must inhale beauty if we want to exhale beauty.
Inhaling beauty means we admit beauty to the deep places within us. We do this by allowing what’s clean, virtuous, life and health-bringing to pass through the portals of our senses (e.g., eyes, ears, etc.) to impact our emotions, thoughts, and desires. To do this, we must be receptive and mindful whenever true beauty is present, be it in moral, physical, spiritual, intellectual, social, or other categories. In our highly distracted culture, inhaling beauty like this can be more difficult than we imagine. For example, it means putting our phones away and simply abiding in the joy of another’s presence, focusing on the conversation at hand, savoring a meal, quietly watching a sunset, and sitting still to actually listen to life-giving music.
If our main premise is true – that we must be beauty-breathers to be beauty-bringers. – then the more beauty we inhale, the more beauty we’ll exhale. In fact, if we’re regularly and rigorously inhaling beauty, we’ll regularly and rigorously exhale beauty. The exhaling-beauty part will often happen without us even knowing we’re doing so! It’ll be as natural and “involuntary” as our physical breathing. How great is that?!
This leads us to one more question: What are you inhaling? Have you surrounded yourself with beauty? Of all kinds? If so, do you regularly admit it into your deep places within? Do you let it affect you, impacting your thoughts, feelings, and desires? Or, do you just fly by the life and health-bringing artwork, relationships, privileges, and possessions in your life day by day?
We can all benefit by being more purposeful beauty-breathing beauty-bringers. So, breathe beauty to bring beauty! In the comments, please share how you cultivate a beauty-breathing life. Thanks.