I was thinking about what it’s like to live or work in a place that is not beautiful. Think an office building in an industrial area: florescent lights, bare walls (or worse, hotel art). I come to these places in my day-to-day life and my soul wants to run away from them. But life requires us to inhabit these places sometimes — whether living or working or serving. So how do I survive? As someone who craves, even needs on a soul-level, the beautiful?

My delight list helps me notice. But it often makes me look big. I want to learn to delight in the small. I think this is how I survive. Finding small beauties, and if not that then small delights.

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When the macro is unsatisfying, look at the micro.

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This is rather trivial when discussing how to survive in ugly places as an artist-soul, but becomes more critical when you think about how to survive suffering. When the circumstances of your life are filled with despair. I am coming to believe that the day-to-day resilience in suffering comes through looking small. Small beauties, small delights.

Pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment, taken alone, was always bearable. — The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

In this way, we discover God in the small things - who is as glorious as God in the large things.