Once someone came to my dinner table and pronounced “everything is pretty”. I suppose that they might have been referring to candles or food or plates or napkins or setting sun or warmth or, or….
Any one of many things which might seem pretty to one or not-quite-noticed by another. Everything was pretty.
Apparently.
I cannot for the life of me get those words out of my head. Now a few years later I think ‘everything is pretty, everything is pretty’. It is not pretty in my world because I need to make everything pretty but because it is just how my hands and heart work — I do stuff.
Pretty or not, I just do it.
But for food and candle and coin to sparkle there need not be candle and coin and sparkle.
There only needs to be us. Because even if there is not sparkle…
Even if there is not a coin…
Then there is still life. And life in all its forms is pretty.
And even when life is not pretty it is still pretty.
In its ugliness it is beautiful. But ah, you have heard me say this before.
In other words.
Life in itself is gosh darn pretty.
Without all the pomp — and circumstance.
Life in its most quiet moments — and invisible ones — is the most beautiful of all.
The Sean Penn character in the movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in my humble opinion, said it best when he declared — in the true words of James Thurber:
“the most beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”
And if you think of it that way then you know, going out into the world, into the quietness and the quiet people and the quiet everything — that
everything is pretty.
