Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

face the fields, which the sun was just then rising above, extended his
arms out in the direction of the serene expanse, and said nothing.
That was the Way. Nature. The cultivated soil. The growing crops.
The satisfaction of good hard work. The poetry of the earth. As it was
in the beginning, as it will be forever.
Not that all beauty is so immediately beautiful. We’re not always
on the farm or at the beach or gazing out over sweeping canyon
views. Which is why the philosopher must cultivate the poet’s eye—
the ability to see beauty everywhere, even in the banal or the terrible.
Marcus Aurelius, who is supposedly this dark, depressive Stoic,
loved beauty in his own Whitmanesque way. Why else would he write
so vividly of the ordinary way that “baking bread splits in places and
those cracks, while not intended in the baker’s art, catch our eye and
serve to stir our appetite,” or the “charm and allure” of nature’s
process, the “stalks of ripe grain bending low, the frowning brow of
the lion, the foam dripping from the boar’s mouth.” Even of dying, he
writes, “Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with
nature. Come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened
olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to
the tree that gave it growth.”
The philosopher and the poet, seeing the world the same way,
both engaged in the same pursuit, as Thomas Aquinas said, the study
of “wonder.”
It was Edward Abbey, the environmental activist and writer, who
said that even the word wildness itself was music. It’s music we can
listen to anytime we like, wherever we live, whatever we do for a
living. Even if we can’t visit, we can think of traipsing through the
pine-bedded floor of the forest, of drifting down a slow-moving river,
of the warmth of a campfire. Or, like Anne Frank, we can simply look
out our window to see a tree. In doing this, in noticing, we become
alive to the stillness.
It is not the sign of a healthy soul to find beauty in superficial
things—the adulation of the crowd, fancy cars, enormous estates,
glittering awards. Nor to be made miserable by the ugliness of the
world—the critics and haters, the suffering of the innocent, injuries,
pain and loss. It is better to find beauty in all places and things.
Because it does surround us. And will nourish us if we let it.