Beauty

Photo: Nick Rusko-Berger

I have been reminded of a kind of beauty I had forgotten. My last few days have been populated by men of various ages who work hard at dirty jobs. I have been able to watch the simple and focused movements of men of craft and experience. The eye riveted on a straight edge while drawing a cutting line. The study of a level bubble. The wielding of a nail gun with confident easy.

I flashed back to my youth when my father, an accomplished carpenter, struggled with his fatigue and frustration to teach me to be of help to him. I caught my share of barked orders and harsh critiques of my abilities. My own ineptitude opened my eyes to the grace of those who had skill. It sometimes inspired awe. It always inspired humility.

My own body at 62 no longer conforms to the lines of standard male beauty. Perhaps this has re-opened my consciousness to alternate forms of beauty in my life. In making peace with gravity and the oxidation of my own tissues, I am learning a new spectrum of what can be seen as having grace, form and appeal. This is not the stuff of glossy Web ads or TV commercials. This is the beauty inherent in the grit of daily life in a real world. 

I think this enhances my practice as a humanist. While I have never set physical beauty as a threshold of my caring for another human being, I was more distracted by it than I realized earlier in my life. Eliminating these distractions in practice is the actualization of humanist focus. Vision narrows on the essential, the important. Then the essential and the commonplace become beautiful in the simplified sight of humanist practice.