Today, the present

I came across an article in today's Globe and Mail that made me stop and pause for a minute.  Entitled "How finding beauty in ordinary life can make you happy", it goes on to describe how the most seemingly ordinary experiences in life can allow us to experience awe and wonder -- to be elevated -- something that I think we are all guilty of neglecting in the hustle and bustle of our daily lives.  Below, snippets from my favourite passages.

Jennifer Gardy, molecular scientist with British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and the new It Girl of Science following the airing of the CBC documentary Myth or Science.
My husband and I bought tickets to a concert in mid November, and he invited two of his work colleagues from Apple to come with us. Before the concert, the four of us got together at our place, and one of the guys said he wanted us all to watch a music video. And I was, like, a music video? Really? I’m not really interested. But with the opening frames, we were all mesmerized. It’s Montana by a group with a really weird name, Youth Lagoon. It’s very evocative about a boy; and it flashes back between the fifties and sixties, when he was small, to the present. The song is really beautiful, and the visuals are impressionistic and hazy like memory. It’s about family and redemption and change and loss and moving forward. The four of us had just been yapping away, and suddenly we all went silent. Some of us cried. Nobody could say anything for a long time.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, priest, Poet Laureate Emeritus of The City of Toronto
I was coming out the elevator doors in Toronto’s city hall, fresh from committee meetings where strategies, costing thousands of dollars, had been discussed for how to make people happy. I see throngs of people gathered around the sound of a flute. Leaning against a pillar in the concourse is a weather-beaten, little old Chinese man, playing a 10-cent tin flute. Playing jazz, playing pop, playing classical. He is free. And he is blind. There’s no collection. His granddaughter comes, gently takes him by the arm, and they go home. Blind and happy, he smiles. Clear-sighted and happy, the people go home. It is how we should live in the city – by the gift of ourselves, inexpensive and priceless.

Lesra Martin, lawyer and Literacy Ambassador for ABC Literacy, who grew up illiterate in New York before coming to Canada as a teenager with the help of benefactors. He went on to be part of the team who helped free Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.
I’m not convinced that beauty is what we see. I think it’s something that we feel. I was in Vancouver in early November and out the window, I could see this street full of trees. They were losing their leaves. I found it a bit sad. But my wife and kids were with me, and when the kids saw the leaves, they reacted as they do with a snowfall. They just wanted to go out and play in them. And that immediately changed my perspective. They find joy in it without reflecting too much. That feeling of circumstances shifting, of a change in perspective, is what I think beauty is. It emanates from within and helps shape who we are.



Photo by Jose Villa