Beauty + Risk
“Joy is the most vulnerable emotion we experience.”
A few days ago, my house went on the market. You know, the one I'm selling for cash in order to address ongoing chronic health issues.
It's been a several-month ordeal.
Making the decision to begin with. Finding a new place to live in this housing market, which is hellish. Getting COVID. Packing up my life after six years there. Moving to a new city after more than 20 years in Denver, only to realize my new rental—complete with 2am wakeup calls from a train running right next to my head—would instantly destroy my sleep and therefore my health. Finding yet another place to live as soon as possible. Packing every box again and moving for the second time in only a few weeks. Renovating my home to get it ready to sell. And now, finally putting it on the market and waiting to see how it goes. All while trying to continue producing content and maintaining any sort of personal connections.
As you might imagine, I am exhausted. We all are, so this isn't as much an odd story as it is simply my particular account of the last year or two.
It appears, however, that I've picked up a small case of PTSD in the process.
Moving twice in the span of a few weeks has a way of making you fearful that this move also won't work out. It doesn't help that, truth be told, I kind of can't afford housing without the padding I'll receive in selling my house. Renting now is three times as expensive as a mortgage initiated six years ago and I am finally focusing fully on making This Plus That my full-time "job." Quite literally, I am giving everything I have for my health, and also to be able to keep doing this work that I love so much. Why? In case you haven't been following along, not doing work you love is intimately tied to your health. At this point, I see them as one and the same.
Regardless, things are financially precarious, and it has me spooked. I keep imagining my home not selling, or selling for less than it seems I need, and having to pack everything again, truly unsure of where I might live.
(Do you remember a newsletter I wrote several months ago, where I talked about how living a big life requires a kind of death to control and certainty? You know, the one where I quipped, "No home? I'll survive."? The universe has a way of double-checking that you're serious.)
Anyway, my version of PTSD in this scenario looks like only partially moving in. I've unpacked all of the boxes, sure. My living room and office and everything else is all set up. But all of the artwork and plants—the things that add a kind of "unnecessarily extravagant" beauty to a place and on some level seem to say, "I am here, and this is home," are still in boxes or stacked on top of each other loosely, on the ground.
I think I fear that hanging art and adorning every free space with greenery would be setting myself up for possible heartbreak. Too strong a show of confidence and trust that this was all the right move. Too silly to think that this new rental, flooded with gorgeous sunlight and a balcony view of the mountains, might be mine to enjoy. Too naïve to believe I can finally, truly rest and take care of my health. Too ridiculous to think I could make a living doing what I love, which is creating this content.
Another way of putting it might be: I am withholding beauty until I know I am safe.
In a conversation with my friend Kyle recently, I told him how sad I am to be renting again, mostly because renting seems to restrict my ability to beautify where I live. Owning not only allows you more freedom to make everything better—how a place looks and how it functions—but engenders pride and care in improving your environment. It gives you a vested interest, a literal investment, in imbuing a place with more life. (There's a whole book to be written here on employee ownership and the idea of "property" and the "owning class," but I'll save it for another time.)
To which he replied, "That's actually the human condition, not just yours."
See, the picture often painted of humanity is one of extraction. Humans take everywhere we go. We hire people so we can take their labor and turn it into our profit. We take a job we hate and give as little as possible to it, saving what little energy we have left to invest it in what we really care about elsewhere. (Either that, or we take a job we hate and still give 110%, because it is impossible for us not to care, leaving us fully extracted from.) Or, we find a resource hidden in the earth and we take it until the soil and rivers are barren.
But are humans really takers? Are we lazy? Do we really want to be extractive, doing as little as possible and getting as much as possible in return?
Or, is it more true that we simply live inside a system that encourages us to withhold our true gifts, afraid that giving them away in generosity and abundance will leave us without the resources we need? Is it possible that humans aren't life-takers, but life-makers? Do we not want to instill more beauty and create more life, everywhere we go?
I think it's the latter. I think we are hard-wired for beauty. I think creating more life is embedded in our actual DNA. Actually, I think creating more life is the natural condition of all life.
So, my innate desire in moving into this new place is to explode beauty everywhere I turn. To make things more fecund, as Andreas Weber might say, no matter how long I am able to live here, and no matter what happens with my housing situation.
Do you know how many times in my life I've been told to let this inclination go? To expect less? To care less? To give less of myself, so that I might save my sanity, or be less disappointed, or less tired? To reserve my hope, to reserve my money, to reserve my energy, to reserve everything I can, so that I might better enjoy life at some future date?
At home, at work, in my relationships, I am told to care less, constantly.
In other words: I am told to withhold beauty so that I might be more safe.
Time and again, my soul responds in only one way: That kind of life is one I'm wholly uninterested in living. Because if the true nature of the universe—the lesson we're supposed to learn here—is to give less life so that we might simply survive each disappointment? To accept that life can only ever be, at best, kind of "okay"? Mediocre?
It's not a world I want to believe in, much less continue being in.
Instead, I think the true nature of the universe is one in which all of life, including humanity, wants to be more and more alive. I think we want to do work that makes us come alive. I think we want to give our biggest gifts while we're here. I think we want to make things more beautiful everywhere we go. I think we want to do every task, every project, at a higher quality than is really "required" of us or beyond what is even financially prudent. I think we want to create more connection, more joy, and more abundance absolutely everywhere.
We want to build intricate cathedrals, create beautiful homes, nurture pristine parks, design life-changing courses, write ridiculously long books, go on meandering walks, help others in need, cure cancer, obsess over every ingredient in a meal, take a year off of work, nap for a full afternoon, meditate for an hour a day, and buy 1,000 plants. Or, say, edit a newsletter for longer than is reasonably "smart," even if only a few people read it.
We see the large-scale work of artists like Es Devlin, the production scale of a movie franchise like Star Wars, the detail of European churches, the epic, breakthrough novel of a once-unknown author, the success of Instagram doulas and herbalists and life coaches and we think, "Wow, what a singular opportunity. What a singular artist." Or, "If only I had the money or the time, I would risk doing something like that."
We see all of that, including me selling my house to take a year off and heal myself and to make this dream come true, and we forget that every single one of those things required risking safety on beauty. Choosing hope over fear, with zero guarantees.
It's really important to be honest about the privilege some people have, like me, to leverage these kinds of assets, and the safety net that so often makes these risks easier. But we also, often, let ourselves believe that it wasn't a real risk, nonetheless, or that we're actually any different from the people we see taking them.
And we forget, too, that squashing our inclination toward beauty actually kills us. Because it's not only withholding beauty and life from ourselves but from everything and everyone around us. If we are not serving and cultivating life, we are serving and cultivating death. It's as simple as that.
Simple, but not easy.
There is no other obvious conclusion, therefore, than to realize that any ways in which we withhold beauty anywhere makes us sick. Withholding beauty and life from the world, including my own home, keeps beauty and life from flowing to me, which, of course, is another way of making myself ill.
That, after all, is the opposite of why I made this decision in the first place.
So today, I plan on hanging art. I plan on buying more plants.
And who knows, maybe trusting I'm safe to give more life here will open the flow of offers on my house, which would open up more opportunities for me to heal and continue giving all of this beauty forward.
That's the world I want to believe in, to invest in.
One where giving more life engenders more life elsewhere, which allows us all to continue giving more and more life everywhere we go.
One where my real work in the world—and yours, too—is only, and forever, making things more beautiful, no matter the outcome.
What a Libra (ahem, human) thing to say.
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