Feeling Blue? Consider the Beauty of Nature
One common happiness challenge is: How do you give yourself a boost when you're feeling blue? Or when you're past the point of feeling blue, and are feeling deeply unhappy?
One refuge is to consider the beauty of nature.
Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backyard-or, in my case, in the trees lining New York City sidewalks, or in the clouds above skyscrapers.
A few nights ago, my eight-year-old daughter burst into my office. She was very excited to show me a video, Pendulum Waves, which shows extraordinary patterns created by the simple pendulum.
Watching the video, I was struck, for the millionth time, by the beauty of nature. I often remind myself of one of my favorite quotations, from Boethius, "Contemplate the extent and stability of the heavens, and then at last cease to admire worthless things." Or I remind myself to "Consider the elephant"-wonder why? Because of this passage from Eugene Delacroix's fascinating Journal.
Do you find that when you're caught in the troubles of your own experience-whether those are grave problems, or petty annoyances-that contemplating nature is helpful?
The extent and stability of the heavens! In a shell, in an elephant, in the clouds, in a rock formation, in the action of a pendulum.
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Also ...
Years ago, my brilliant friend Kim Malone Scott wrote a novel, Virtual Love, about love and life at Google, but I never got to read it, because she didn't publish it. I was so happy to learn that at last she has published it, and I've ordered my copy of Virtual Love. You can read a rave discussion of it in a Wired article by Steven Levy, The Lost Google Novel that Takes a Better Look at Tech Culture than The Circle.
