Tag Archives: reality

Beauty Is Real

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Is something real, beautiful, or is something put into words beautiful?  I keep looking at the building construction outside my office window, and I keep seeing beauty in the materials, the strength in the colors of the cement and the wood and the steel.  Sometimes the rhythm of nail drivers, sometimes hammers, and even shouts of men’s voices and the crash of the things thrown, have a beauty that is heard.  The saw and the hum of the crane and the bull dozers is constant, like the many voices in unison can be heard, but not the words.

This scene is most welcoming, and almost soothing, in the morning after an hour commute.  Something human is constructive.  With a long day ahead, it is reassuring to believe it will work, that the frustration common in work is always happening, but things will be greater than this–especially the sounds continuing towards the establishment of something new–or even just a new building.

So, is the world filled with useless work?  Is some of this work needless, and wasteful?  Is the only goal to do something every day that you can do?  Or should your job verge, always, on the pleasurable?  Is it important that you be loved, or loved for your role, your position, your job?  If you have no money to spend on your home, do you still have a home?

In utopia, there is no money.  Only endless jobs to do, and therefore continually, and endlessly, make the universe work.  There is no demotions and promotions, related to money, but just achievement, the goal, since this is what makes people happy and proud.  At this point I think of my mother’s home.  For decades now, she has kept a special list, titled, “A Happy Home Recipe.”  It mentions things like love, loyalty, forgiveness and friendship, plus another four that deal with others helping you out, hope, tenderness, faith, and laughter.  For the longest time, I felt this was the most perfect, more beautiful thing of all.  The way I felt as if I were  being hugged, and loved.  I have no memory of being with my mother on a shopping trip to particularly buy this plaque, and I think, this is why I don’t associate its message with money.  I still think of it when I visit my mother.

Now, back to beauty.  Are beautiful things the only things that are real?  To take a thought experiment to the extreme end, the foible of human beings is to assume that beautiful things are naturally rich, and better, and easier.  Take all the glam and money in Las Vegas….  The stores there only have things that can be bought with a mortgage, and it is assumed that if you go to Vegas, you have some money to spend, or invest.  I have been there, and I do admit that my thoughts tend to run on and I see fountains running and spraying with coins rather than water.  It is like money can make the impossible happen.  Is it beautiful?  Is it even real?

Sometimes, I wish for more privacy than the hordes in Las Vegas can give me when I am on a trip or vacation.  The idea, I think, is that crowds there, fill the void common in any city or town.  It is along “the strip” that I am thinking.  In any other city, at a place of beauty, there is no sense of abandon.  That people are carefree and laughing, and not thinking of the priorities that need to be done by next week.  The “strip” is teeming with hordes of people, especially the young and rich, who exude this energy.  There is no rush, no hurry.  Only pleasure and enjoyment.  And, yes, lots and lots of money.  For most people any other trip or vacation cannot rival the wealth and riches of Las Vegas.  The non-stop flow of money in and out.  Taking a cruise to somewhere comes close, though.

So, in my thoughts, I am guessing that beauty is not limited to “real” things.  Every day, I draw breath, at the small things that happen.  The brown hare in our backyard.  The call of the infrequent owl at night when I have opened my window.  The construction sit that builds and moves slowly, by increments, like watching a stop-action camera become conscious and produce a film over months.  I love the first snowfall.  So delicate, and light, as if the snow is the real color of transparency.  I love the beauty of the old parts of town, where artisans have set up shop, creating and selling wares, of beauty and imagination.

I am looking forward to surprising my children to a two week vacation in December, for the Christmas Holidays.  Filling their days with some warm sunshine, and, hopefully, a sense of carefree joy.  To suddenly, one year have a Christmas away from snow, and attending too many get-togethers and parties.  I am sure where we are going, there will be a “Midnight Christmas Party.”

The Reality of Mother’s Day

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We always hope things are real.  We tell ourselves that things are real.  That we wouldn’t be here if the things that happen are not real.

It is surreal that bodies are left here when a person dies and passes on.  It is surreal that people will use a gun to kill.  It is surreal that guns are manufactured when it is obvious people do not treat them as toys, but as a real way to kill people.

Why is life like this?  What do we consider is alive and what do we consider is worth living for?

From a scientist’s point of view, things that rely on each other, as in being in an eco-system, are things (organisms) that are alive.  As for the polar opposite, the solar system, not one thing in it (except earth) is actually alive.  It exists in a rhythmic, inanimate, and up to mathematical accuracy like many cogs working in a beautiful machine.

It seems the reality is that we do not only live for the best things in life.  Things  get in the way, and immediately, we return the supposed blow to our ego and esteem with an equal and greater blow.  What starts this continuous cycle?  And why do we rely on each other like this?

I was at a lunch meeting the other day, and even in the civilized and sophisticated office that I work in, we were all together eating lunch and uninhibitedly trading bits of gossip.  I mean, I can only brag about my children only oh so much before I look like I’m obsessed with them.

We had booked the day to both eat and also make use of our time to plan and discuss the issues for our next project.  Several times through the meeting, opinions of the ideas and possible creations that we wanted to make and deal with were brought up, and also, summarily batted down.  I do not doubt that some of the members of our team, had worked hard to try to make their ideas and plans the one that would fly.

I am not saying that this hasn’t happened to me, but it seems to just be the smaller version of the large-eco-system reality that we are surrounded by and live in.  Where some people will use threat and force to deal with a negative reception, others will keep a careful  diary of a “track record” and use this as leverage for job loss or being looked over for a promotion.  And, of course, there is just plain blows to the ego.  And how long and how many times can someone just sit through peers’ negative comments and bullying?

So, why is this reality? Are we helping to shape the world as it will be?  A century from now?  Are we encouraging merit?  Or, are we just encouraging the same old Earth that has been here millions of years, because, quite frankly, it just won’t change?

I am hoping there is something called “Evolution.”  It sounds to me like the answer to Earth’s burgeoning problems.  Charles Darwin studied animals, and found that they, even with their limited brain size, were capable of change and gain. Sure, they were nothing like human beings, but because they responded to changes in their environment, slowly, they were changing the next generation, if not changing their own very entrenched behaviors, at the moment they responded.  Soon, species of animals were created, and new breeds were found and the animal kingdom grew and flourished.

Human beings, being capable of planned thought, unfortunately, are not responding as positively to pressures and change.  We keep doing and keep thinking like all the generations previous to ours….  Well, why?  Because nothing at all has actually changed!

So, we, reading that our ancestors used swords to settle problems, we will us knives and guns to allay ours.  We will bully, because reading how well it works, we know how to do it and make it work ourselves.  Have you thought of a better way of doing things?  Even if I wanted to be a one-woman-band, and declare a brand new way of living, clean of blood, sweat and death, no one would actually listen.  I would be ostracized as a problem, and considered dealt with.

Mother’s Day is this weekend, and like everyone else, I love Mother’s Day, because I have a mother I love.  I would never bully my mother.  I would never call her bad names.  I will never stick her in a god-forsaken hole when she grows old and feeble, as I want to take care of her.  At least this is something that exists in a very real way.  We are all children, and therefore we all have mothers and fathers.  There reality of life is that we get tired of loving.  And the reality is that we become embroiled in wars instead.  It is a quick way to make life work and a quick way to make some money on it, without ties that bind in forever bondage.