The Trick to Seeing Beauty in Every Moment

This video by one of my favorite recording artists is stunning. The cinematography. The atmospheric vocals. The concept. The journey. The scenery. The sprawling American terrain. The wild creatures. As I was watching it, though, I became aware of a subtle source of beauty that is easy to overlook: the most beautiful parts of the video happen when the producer plays with time.

Time speeds up and in time-lapse we watch the starry dome rotate above the plains, though of course we’re really experiencing the earth rotate within the vastness of space. Or it slows down, and in slow-motion you experience in every nerve ending the terrible wonder and danger of a lone wolf.

With this altered sense of time, wind becomes a character. Birds become a song without making any sound at all. Clouds become predators on the land. The moon a sentinel. The atmosphere an overseer. Every step something brave. All because the producer decided to play with time.

Life works this way, too.

Slow down time with a moment of mindfulness, so for just an instant of radical presence you see it all creeping by instead of flying by—the pendant hanging from your rearview mirror; the red vine creeping up a tree in the middle of a dark green forest; your toddler trying to scoop the last little bit of apple sauce from a plastic saucer with their soft, tiny forefinger—and the beauty of every ordinary little thing becomes almost too much to bear.

Or speed it up in whatever way you can—a slideshow of photos at a 50th wedding anniversary, a whole lifetime of love flashing by in 180 seconds; the graduation of a child that sneaks up on you so all you can see when you look at their cap and gown is their first skinned knee; any near miss that makes you realize how quickly it can, and will, all come to an end—and the beauty of the whole vast, sprawling, mess of a human life become impossible to miss.

I think that’s why we love stories so much. For instance, in The Unhiding of Elijah Campbell, you get to watch one man’s lifetime in time-lapse. You get to watch the rise and fall and rise again of a human life, in just a few hours of turning pages. It makes you realize what kind of beauty is possible in your own life, if only you have the eyes to see it, within time, across time.

Stories. Books. Novels. They change time, and by changing time, they change us. That’s the beauty of them.