Why don’t parents gush more about the positives in their children and the rewarding nature of parenting?
It’s scary. You look into their open, innocent eyes and it’s alarming and frightening; it sends a jolt of love so intense it’s almost painful through your chest. Your heart is out there wandering around without you; you want to protect yourself from the immensity of that love and how it’s so vast, so outside of your control.
Perhaps this is similar to how we are often afraid to assume good things will happen. There’s a certain fear that really opening myself up to the hope of wonder and fulfilled desires may somehow cause us to lose them - or hurt more if we do.
Perhaps we are afraid of opportunity, of opening to love, of daring to hope, because we worry that even if we ‘get’ these things, we don’t deserve them or can’t handle them well.
There’s something awe inspiring and terrifying about good.
Why do we shrink back from learning about the depths of someone else’s experience? What does it even mean to open myself up to that? What might I discover about the weight of existence, or my own missteps and power, if I do?
Why is it unnerving to love?
Is it simply because it's so much bigger than us and we cannot contain or control or even describe the magnitude of what we may find, what we may feel, what we may transform? Jordan Peterson’s thoughts on beauty are as follows, and to me, they shine a floodlight onto why we scape intimacy, vulnerability, and the overwhelming innocence that speaks to us from the eyes of a child:
“Beauty leads you back to what you have lost. Beauty reminds you of what remains forever immune to cynicism.
Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim.
Beauty reminds you that there is lesser and greater value.
Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtue, and responsibility. But beauty is among the greatest of these.
There’s wide agreement, at least in some instances, on what is spectacularly beautiful.
I mean, you can see that with the pilgrims that flood into Europe, and you think, well, they’re not pilgrims!
Well what do you think the tourists are that go to Europe if they’re not pilgrims? What do they go to look at? They go to look at beautiful things.
They’ve fallen out of the religious landscape to such a degree that they don’t even know that they’re on a pilgrimage, and they don’t even know that they’re called to worship beauty. They don’t have any idea that that’s a call to a higher form of being, because we’ve shallowly criticized our religious propositions.
We don’t even understand when they start to manifest themselves in an embodied manner and pull us here and there. It’s happening politically all the time.
Beauty tells you to be more than you are. Beauty tells you to aspire to that which is beyond you.
Beauty says there is something beyond you.
All of that, and it does that in an enticing manner. It invites you to come along.
It’s the opposite of authoritarianism. It’s an invitation.
Beauty is a window into the transcendent.
Art transforms people’s lives because a great piece of art is like a portal through which Beauty pours and it can pour over everything. It’s terrifying!
Someone said that we put frames around paintings to keep the beauty stuck in the painting, because you don’t want it leaking out all over the house and causing trouble. It’s like letting God into your life.
Something beyond the mundane that beckons to you.
What bothers you? That’s what calls you forward into who you could be. That’s what calls you forward into participating in the process of setting the world right, and there’s meaning in that.
If we took our distaste for the world seriously and noticed that that was a call from our conscience to action, that we would start to act forthrightly in the world and set things right, then the question would be, “Well, how right could they be set?” You know I said opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated. Well that’s learned opportunity, that’s the wind that blows you into a port, that’s what opportunity means.
That’s the derivation and responsibility. It’s the wind that blows you into a port.
There are things that are crying out to be done and you know it, and it can make you bitter. It’s like, you could do them - you could start doing them. You could try to do them. That would be something.
God only knows what you could accomplish if you did that! God only knows what you could transform!
Opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.”
Beauty is a terrifying, haunting, promising call to step off the cliff of the familiar, to be carried into the great unknown.