Have you ever been talking to someone and used or heard the phrase "painfully beautiful?" Have you ever thought about it? Why would somebody say that? Isn't beauty a good thing? Isn't pain a bad thing? Why would you stick them together? Is it like when you are laughing so hard your stomach hurts? Too much of a good thing?
I don't think so.
I think I have an idea of what "painfully beautiful" means. It may not be true for you. You may not agree with me. That's okay. But hopefully by reading through my thoughts you will gain some perspective for another's life. Maybe that will help you somewhere. Or rather, maybe it will help someone else.
I really want you to understand my thoughts, so I am going to breakdown some things here so we have a platform to work from. What is something beautiful? Well, some people are beautiful. Some art works are beautiful. Sometimes Mother Gaia is beautiful. I might even say that time can be beautiful, 
if you only look at isolated chunks of it. Weddings? Beautiful (hopefully). First kiss? Beautiful. (Again, hopefully.) First children, graduations, jobs, promotions, new cars, new phones, great cakes....lots of moments can be beautiful. But this just leads me to ask, "What could all these disparate things possibly have in common?"
They are all good. They all bring joy to the lives they touch (Except sometimes weddings. I think I've seen a movie about that once...) And that is what makes them beautiful. The light they put into lives. The pure, undefinable goodness that we all know. All of the things I've listed are beautiful and good, but there are a few things that are exceptionally good, surpassingly beautiful, without which life feels incomplete. I hesitate to make a list here, because opinions and lives are so infinitely varied, but I'm sure you can think of a few things. Go ahead. Do it now. I'll wait.
Do you have your list? Good. Now think about everything on it. Think about each thing individually. Think about them together. Think about your life in relation to your list. Now imagine a life where you know all of these things, and you know that none of them will ever be a part of your life. Really tell yourself that you will never be loved. That you will never have children. Whatever it is you put on your list, imagine knowing that you can never have or experience it. Did you feel that? That was pain. Not because of any one thing causing you pain. A diploma can't hurt you. But you know how good it is. How beautiful the moment you when you receive it. And the pain comes from the sense of loss. Losing the beautiful, watching it disappear from your life and knowing you have to keep walking even though the light will be a little dimmer.
To me, that is "painfully beautiful."
I loved this. This was too much for me. Thank you, Dan.
ReplyDeleteKierkegaard describes a phenomenon in the analogy of a young man who talks about love as a memory. He falls in love with a young woman and experiences one pure moment of joy. They continue a relationship for some time but the young man realizes that his entire relationship with her is predicated on the memory of that one beautiful moment of love and that he hasn't and never will experience love as purely as at that one time. Which causes him pain. He ends up breaking up with the woman believing that she deserves better than that.
ReplyDeleteTo me, that memory, that nostalgia is what makes something painfully beautiful. It's in reading a good book for the first time and having that experience. In seeing a beautiful work of art for the first time. In experience love for the first time. It's in knowing that even though you've had that one pure moment of joy, you can never experience it like that again. It's a sense of finding and losing something. It is painfully beautiful.
Giving birth is painfully beautiful. What's really interesting though, is that so is simply being a parent. My son went to nursery for the first time on Sunday, and I cried. He did great, he is growing up and learning and experiencing life, and that is beautiful. What's painful is the fact that I can't be there every moment like I'd like to be, watching, encouraging, helping. Letting him become independent is painfully beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI think something is also painfully beautiful when it almost seems too good to be true. It's a feeling of not being big enough to comprehend something so intensely beautiful it hurts. It's the feeling of something being so majestic and profound that your humanness is not enough to let it be realized fully. It's this thought that you don't deserve all the ways in which the earth calls out her beauty to you.
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