"All men are like grass, and all their glory like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall" - Isaiah 40:6-7

I’ve been thinking about beauty. The curve of lips on one woman, the splash of ocean mist on a boy’s face, the hair of a loved one, some gem in a person that makes them able to express joy and sorrow in gilded words on a page, a heart that beats faster when it sees injustice, and longs to do good – everything passes away on this earth, after living for an instant in our bodies. The beauty of every human is lost when they die, or when the times change – if we added up all the goodness that has existed in this world, every good thing that come out of what people were or what they experienced… the whole universe could not contain every good moment. But these things don’t add up; once (if) they are noticed they are lost to the past, they’ll never happen again. Think of the value of that one instant when you opened your eyes and found you were laying under the soft covers of your own warm bed, and you looked at the clock, turned over, and sunk back into sleep again. That moment has disappeared.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, only to say that it’s such a shame that so many human hearts have been wasted. People with innate impulses to benefit the world have died with hardly the chance to affect a few people – people in labor camps, people who die young with a preventable disease, people who squander their time in the business of each day. Billions of us have gone wasted!! What can we do to catch this beauty, to realize it and show it to the world, where it won’t be forgotten, at least for one more generation. So many talents have been lost to the tragic way our world works. Where will the souls of all those people go?
I want to see and capture the beauty in every person I deeply love, and I want to hold onto it eternally, so that someone will triumphantly raise it high eons from now and cry “look! look! see what came into the world?? see what the world consists of?!”
But they will die, and so will I, and new beauties will be apparent in still more and still too few moments.
I wonder, if there’s a heaven – if there’s a God, if He…
He must be the most wonderful and terrible being that could possibly exist – he must be all those good things and all that torture added up, compounded and under some rationality that allowed Him to decide at the beginning of earth how to use all that horror and exquisiteness.
I think in some ways we choose how much of it we experience. Those of us who are privileged, I mean. Those of us who have money and homes and healthy bodies and political freedom. And yet I’m sitting here typing on my $2000 computer, and this is neither horrific or exquisite; it is nothing. I’m allowed to do as much nothing with my life as I choose, and also as much everything. I’ll choose nothing and little somethings most often, but I think I will always wonder about the everything I could be doing.