How Beauty Opens the Heart

Poppies and mother's pitcher

Source: By Madelyn Blair, 2010

When I was writing my application to The Wharton School, I remember being asked to write an essay on three things important to me.

Years later, I was told that the admissions staff looked mostly at the second item. It may have been they decided that applicants used the first and third to try to game the system. The second seemed to be more indicative of the character of the applicant. (Please don’t ask me to verify this. I just remember hearing it from someone I felt was reliable. It may be different today.) There must be something important about the second choice. To this day, I can’t recall the first or the third item I wrote about. Yet, I have always remembered the second.

My second item was beauty. Why did I remember that one? I am conscious of beauty in almost everything I do. I don’t talk about it, I just conduct my life in a manner that I feel creates beauty. Then one day, an interviewer asked me what was so important to me that I wished I could attend to it every day. That question forced me to put my feelings into words. The question surprised me, but my answer surprised me more.

The answer, of course, was beauty. What I could attend to, I actually do attend to every day. All the whats began to tumble out of my mouth almost as if they were happy to be let out finally. I observe how the colors of a book enhance the topic it espouses. I arrange flowers for the table. I take notice of the interaction between mother and child. I take time to look at the progression of a story, sometimes called the story arc. I listen for when a presenter answers someone’s question in a simple yet clear and respectful manner. I was surprised as the list seemed to go on.

Defining Beauty

A few months later, I was talking with researcher Diana Whitney, who asked me how I defined beauty.

If describing what I do every day to see the beauty in my life was nothing compared to the sudden insight I gained from answering that question. “Beauty is what opens the heart,” I answered without hesitation.

Diana seemed excited about my answer. She agreed beauty is one that opens possibilities well beyond what is just pretty. She added that beauty is also in the moment when a job is completed and, feeling satisfied with a job well done, the final product is described as beautiful. Or perhaps it is a workshop design that brought a group to a level of connection and trust that the work achieved more than the stated goals. We say it was a beautiful design. In these examples, the feeling that was engendered was keen satisfaction in the first, and perhaps amazement in the second.

In the Heart

As I noticed that in each case an emotion was engendered, I remembered something. Months earlier, I had been thinking about something entirely different when the thought arrived that beauty is an emotion. Now, I could see it isn’t exactly the emotion but rather that it evokes one, and that one that it evokes has a generative nature about it—it gives or enhances life. Now, I was beginning to see the grandeur of this simple word that captures us, sometimes unaware. Imagine my delight when I found H. G. Wells's statement, “Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.”