There’s beauty everywhere in every moment

Donald Glover on beauty, grace, and success

Photo: NY Times

I’ve been slowly making way through the NBC sit-com Community (Season 3, Blankets and Forts!) so it caught my eye this week when the NY Times interviewed Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino. Some quotes stuck out for me:

Quote 1: Attention

“I’m not 25 anymore, standing in front of a boulder like, ‘This has to move.’ You give what you can, but there’s beauty everywhere in every moment. You don’t have to build it. You don’t have to search for it.”¹ — Donald Glover

When you’re 25, you think the boulder as to move. When you get older, you see different ways around. You don’t have to get what you want to be happy anymore. You don’t have to strain. Evelyn Underhill, 20th century English mystic:

“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday.”

As most of you know, I have a conflicted relationship with travel, that post-modern mix of conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption. I have the time to travel, I have the means, but good God, I just wrote an entire post last week about GHG emissions. Maybe the issue isn’t whether you should travel, but how much. My parent’s generation had a concept: the “once-in-a-lifetime” trip, usually to Europe, or to Africa, or to Asia. For many Americans now, those trips are yearly trips.² We feel itchy, deprived, if we don’t.

As with all our consumption of the material world, the question is: how much is enough? For many, there is never enough.

Travel is the socially acceptable hungry ghost. And we’ll destroy to get it. As I said, I feel very conflicted about it. Perhaps that is a good sign.

Side question: what is travel for?³ In the language of Nonviolent Communication, we have strategies to meet emotional needs. What “need” does travel fulfill?

“And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, not dimmed by familiarity, and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” — Pico Iyer

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.” — Marcel Proust⁴

Maybe we don’t have to fly on a plane to get that heightened state of awareness, to see the world with new eyes. We’re always trying to escape ourselves, as if that’s the best way to feel mindful, receptive, and ready to be transformed. Maybe it’s always available to us, right here now.

What are we really seeking? There is beauty everywhere in the moment. You don’t have to search for it.

For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday.

Quote 2: Grace is undervalued in the world

“I think grace is undervalued in the world. When I put my son on my shoulders, I feel deep joy. That’s real. No one on their deathbed is going to look back and say, ‘Thank God I avoided being cringe.’” — Donald Glover

I think our education system reinforces our negativity bias. The more you can see wrong, the more informed cynicism you have, the smarter you are. The more you are rewarded, the more attention you can get from others.

I believe sincerity is in short supply in this world. Sincerity is one of my favorite traits in people.⁵ Sincerity is simple. Sincerity is easy. On Sunday morning, in the interstitial space between sleep and wakefulness, I had the realization:

“Life is good.

And I’m grateful.”

Life is good, but for it to mean anything, it takes appreciating it.⁶ As Sister Mary Jo taught me: “Grace is everywhere, we’re drenched in it. We just have to become awake to it.”

So simple, so easy.

So hard.

Grace is undervalued in the world. Put your son on your shoulders, talk in a baby voice to your dog, or whatever cringe equivalent there is for you. Love is the door. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Quote 3: the most valuable real estate

“Success to me is, honestly, being able to put out a wide-scale album that I would listen to… If people listen to this album and it becomes a part of their identity, if they look back a year later and are reminded of how much they listened to it and what that felt like in the summer of ’24 — that kind of real estate is way more valuable to me (than chart metrics).”

Integrity.

This is my 103rd newsletter post. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth the time to write; I don’t have a ton of readers or get a lot of income from it. But I write what I would want to read. Occasionally readers comment and tell me something I wrote affected them.

This kind of real estate feels good.

Thank you for reading.

1. Wu-wei

2. My friend Chip Conley just published “The 12 Perfect Places for Each Month of the Year.”

3. I got this question from the provocative new book “What are Children For?

4. Actual quote: “The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.”

5. Ben Keesey if you’re reading this.

6. Appreciation is (a) the recognition and enjoyment of something, (b) a full understanding of a situation. What you appreciate appreciates. Check out my platform The Appreciation Effect.