Seeing Beauty

    "Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."

                                                                 ~ Franz Kafka

        Beauty surrounds us and is inside us. Someone may possess a beautiful dream inside themselves.  Another person may have a beautiful song within them.  When you appreciate beauty, says Kafka, you remain youthful. Perhaps, we should mark our birthdays, not chronologically but by another method. 

         What beauty did you see today? The greatest poets know that beauty is timeless and ageless.

    You cannot judge beauty only by the surface appearance of things. Close your eyes and listen to this song below. Can you hear the beauty? 

 Khalil Gibran said, "Beauty is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,                                   
                      But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears." 

    In September of 1942, a young doctor named Viktor Frankl, his new bride, his mother, father, and brother, were arrested in Vienna and taken to a concentration camp in Bohemia.  It was events that occurred there and at three other camps, including Auschwitz,  that led the young doctor - prisoner 119,104 - to realize the significance of meaningfulness in life.

    In his book, "Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl,  prisoner and Holocaust survivor,  wrote about his experiences and how the love of his wife sustained him:

  

 1.  "But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness.  I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look.  Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

 2.  "My mind still clung to the image of my wife.  A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing--which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self.  Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance."

   When you love someone deeply, the image you see lasts even when you close your eyes. Neither sleep, remote distance, imprisonment, nor passage of time changes that beauty.