One of the free Street Wisdom Tune Ups at the heart of this beautiful, simple practice is: Sense the beauty in everything and everyone.
All the Tune Ups are awakening the whole of us, bone by bone, organ by organ, sense by sense.
This final one, as David Pearl, founder of Street Wisdom, writes in Wanderful, “is designed to activate one of the most potent direction seekers of all: the human heart“.
The point of the Tune Up isn’t so much to follow our heart, but to awaken in us that most potent of qualities. Unconditional love.
And we say ‘sense’ not ‘see’ because so much that doesn’t look beautiful actually is, when you slow down and really notice it.
This is all very well and good in its own right, but a recent book has brought to light an interesting knock-on effect of sensing the beauty in everything.
Timothy Hampton’s new book, Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History, suggests that sensing the beauty in everything might also help us become more cheerful.
Hampton suggests, referring to the writer Emerson, that if you want to be cheerful, a good place to start is to:
“take delight in the world… For Emerson, the key to cheerfulness is an acceptance of the beauty of the world.”
Indeed, for Emerson, the poet was cheerful because poets “delight in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them”.
So as well as being more cheerful, Street Wisdom might also help you become more poetic? For which we might read more generally: creative.
Let us know how it’s going as you sense the beauty in the world that sparkles around you.
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Inspired? Street Wisdom is all about finding better ways. Join a Walkshop near you, or head out for your own wander right now with our Tune Ups. Buy your own copy of Wanderful, all profits go back into Street Wisdom to help keep it free.
We wrote this post inspired by the Guardian review of Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History by Timothy Hampton (Princeton Press).
