On Beauty

A rambling pep-talk.

At the end of ROSALÍA’s Sauvignon Blanc, if you listen closely, you can hear gentle clapping—palmas flamenco— a heartbeat, a lament, a glimmer. In the video, a car burns as she watches and the clapping fades.

This morning, I write having slept very little because our toddler marched into our room in the middle of the night demanding milk and our dog has been throwing up since yesterday. I’m currently surrounded by paper towels marking the spots where we cleaned up after her and dowsed the rugs with stain remover. Down to the right of where I sit, there’s a toy barn and an assortment of animals—a llama, speaking to a chicken, and a horse, a dog, and a moo-cow convening nearby. Another toy llama is perched atop a toy kitchen where there is a small decorative pumpkin inside a tiny frying pan. Out the front window, the bright white snow gleams in the cool dawn light in three parallel bands that mark the road where early commuters cut through our neighborhood from the highway into the city. The weather app on my computer says it’s 9 degrees. The chair in which I sit and the small side table I use as a foot rest is tucked into the corner of the overflowing bookshelves in the living room. In the dining room just to my right, beyond the roll of paper towels and the cleaning spray on the table, a lamp casts warm light across my daughter’s artwork hanging on the wall. My dog, Milly, sleeps at my feet, quietly breathing. She looks like a seal. I’m drinking coffee from a green fluted mug my wife (a very talented potter) made. It’s perfect. It’s beautiful. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Once, when I was eleven or twelve, I hopped over the railing on the deck outside my room and nestled myself into a corner where two faces of the roof meet. The house I grew up in was also the office and rec-hall for a campground my family ran from 1960 to 2002. On the outside of the wood railing I carved: I will be bored for the rest of my life— I can’t remember if I used punctuation or not.

Later this morning, I sit at a long table at one of my three favorite cafes in Cambridge. It used to be a bookstore, but they moved down the road over a year ago and the cafe has since spread out and become a third space living room for the community. Bright sun pours through the long row of south facing windows. People squint as they stare and click at their laptops. There’s a mostly finished thousand piece puzzle depicting a floral still life at a low round table in the center of the room drenched in golden light. A book called Amphibians, a short story collection by Lara Tupper, faces me on one of the bookshelves the bookstore left and the cafe has repurposed. A woman with glasses looks at her phone with her laptop open and a large iced coffee is on the table beside her. The ice has melted and the coffee, cream, and water are beginning to separate. A man with long black hair who I know gets a bagel most mornings sits to my right—we just made eye contact while he was mid-bite. He has cream cheese on his lip. He’s still looking at me. We smile at each other.

Whatever my type of ADHD is, it does not come with physical hyperactivity. I’m certain, if given the right conditions, I could be still and silent for an entire day existing solely in my inner world, exploring my inner landscape, making connections, imagining. For years, I assumed this was because I’m an only child, our I was lazy. Who knows. It’s me. It has also taken me years to return to a place in which I accept this part of myself as essential to who I am.

Beauty is all around me and I can see it if I pay attention.

And I’m certain that my ability to recognize beauty, to notice it, has decreased as my comfort with boredom has diminished.

If the movie Fight Club was made today, I think (spoiler) instead of blowing up the credits card company buildings at the end of the film, they’d blow up all the servers stealing our attention and free society from the cage we’ve built around ourselves. This is, of course, fiction—but short of this, we have choice.

I was invited to be a guest in an entrepreneurship class at Tufts University recently and was asked some wonderful questions about the various things I have done and do in this world—one of which was: “Why?”

Or, what is the through-line, the purpose, of all I do?

I answer this question differently every time I’m asked it. I might never be able to say it perfectly. This week, my answer was: to remind people that we are sensitive animals in a landscape. But it’s more than that of course, or perhaps more simple. All of the things I do , I think, come from a place that seeks beauty.

A follow up question from a student was: “How do you know?”

My immediate and short answer was: “Vibes.” But when I elaborated, I spoke of a resonance I felt.

Another question I was asked was: “So, Elon Musk. Now that I’ve provoked you, please respond.”

There is an intentional and sustained assault on beauty right now. The divine is under attack. The purpose of this assault is to make us feel awful, to force us to give up. Consider the Kennedy Center and all of the beauty it once was, and will be again, filled with.

I answered this provocation with the story of service leadership I wrote about last time and shared my perspective that many of the most resilient businesses are not centered around their founder, but rather the people they serve.

This is business speak for: to create something beautiful, something resonant, don’t make it all about yourself.

Like many artists, I’ve struggled with how to proceed and create right now. But I have to. We all have to keep going in whatever direction we sense beauty, even if it’s only somewhere in the depths of our inner landscapes, somewhere only we can sense.

Beauty offends the self-centered just as expression offends the repressed. But the divine transcends and all it takes to access its light is to notice it. I’m not saying this is easy, but I do believe it is our moral imperative, and a worthy act of resistance to try— and if we see its glimmer, feel its resonance, or hear its gentle heartbeat, no matter how mundane it might seem, we must share it with others.

-Caleb

Or if you need a different vibe and to move your body…