Searching for Tiny Beautiful Things
Shouldn't this be easier?
Everyday I make note of one thing that brings a little joy into my life. According to the app I make these notes in, I’ve been doing this since February 14, 2022, but it’s actually been longer than that. In 2020 and 2021 I noted them in my paper planner, and I feel like I did something else when I decided to move all my planner-y stuff to Notion in the beginning of 2022, until I discovered the app I currently use (thanks for the tip about Day One,
).I’m not sharing this to say wow, look how awesome I am at this daily joy and beauty and gratitude thing. Nope. Quite the opposite. I want to share about how I’m actually not that great at it at all.
Sure, some days it’s easy. Like the day I happened to be out for a run just as the sky was awash in brilliant orange-pink swirling into deep blues of the dwindling darkness. Or I looked down at just the right moment to see that tiny sunny yellow flower pushing its way through the crack in the sidewalk, finding its light no matter the obstacles. There’s the day that little packs of my very favorite Goldfish crackers (the Parmesan ones) showed up in the snack basket rotation at work. Or the afternoon I spotted an ever-illusive squirrel clutching an abandoned potato chip in it’s tiny hands.
But to be honest, most days aren’t that.
Many, many days I open the app and my finger hovers over the tiny keyboard on my phone as I scan back through my day thinking: what was particularly beautiful today, anyway? Most times this is for very ordinary reasons— like my work calendar got particularly full and I can’t remember doing much other than clicking from one Zoom meeting to the next, squeezing in a lunch in the middle of it, and ending the day in a bit of a screen-time induced stupor. It’s hard to find a sparkle of beauty in this sort of normal, benign blur of a day.
Occasionally the reasons it’s hard to see the beauty are less than ordinary. Like the series of evenings spent in the hospital while my father-in-law was in hospice care earlier this fall— days filled with a knowing and not knowing. Full of memories. And whens and what nexts. Of waiting. Days blurred together, but far from benign. Days where clearly it would be easy to give myself a pass on the whole finding beauty and joy thing.
I looked back at those hospital days in my app to see what I noted down. Sunset appears twice. As do notes about seeing cats in windows in my neighborhood. It was near the beginning of the semester, so there are a couple notes about running into students again and having a nice conversation. If I read further, past the hospital days, there is much gratitude for family and friends, for kind prayers and intentions, for the smell of funeral incense and the blessing that clung in its slow-sinking smoke.
I wonder now if maybe those benign days, the ones that are normal but blurry— where I have to think really hard to remember that I marveled just a little over the size of the leaves that had fallen from the oak tree in the park— are building an important muscle. The one that will help me find the shards of light even when things seem dark. The pockets of sweet within the bitter.
And perhaps it’s actually in those benign days and those darker days where the heart of this practice lies. Maybe the goal here is not so much about easily accessing the beauty of the world at all times. But more about the searching. The thinking hard. Not immediately seeing it but finding it anyway.
After all, my goal for this practice isn’t to color the world some toxic overly rosy shade of everything is always joyful and beautiful and lovely, but to nurture a sense of wonder. To train my eye see the small acts of kindness, to notice the tiny shards of pretty, to crack through that negativity bias we all carry just a little bit.
Maybe it doesn’t get easier.
And maybe that was the point all along.
Beautiful Thing of the Week
Here’s a tiny lovely thing I love (check out last week’s longer list for some great reads and a fun holiday pub song).
🧶 Froggy, the tiny knitted frog from India Rose Crawford, is always a source of joy for me. That sweater! Those little eyes. All the details. Truly a tiny delight!
Would love your thoughts on this? Do you struggle to find those tiny moments of beauty sometimes? Do you find value in seeking them even when things feel dull and benign? What about in hard times? Let me know in the comments.
Be well and find tiny joy (even when it’s not so easy),
Mary Chris