How can we not translate this beautiful moment?
How do we define beauty? What is beautiful?
We feel beauty first. Before we know what’s happening, we are experiencing it. And maybe this is where we become most aware of how sensations take hold of us. We see or hear or taste or smell or feel some thing and we feel something. Our senses blossom and lead us to the source, but how do we know it's beautiful?
We start to explore and we pause. Explore, and pause. But this paradoxical movement is where the awareness begins. Where the feeling happens. We feel the momentum building, the interaction between the thing and our senses is happening within us.
We are engaged as we experience the initial connection, and we remain engrossed throughout and beyond as the beautiful thing twists and transforms within us. It changes us and we change it. We change it.
This is the translation.
All the beautiful things we've personally experienced before this interaction influence our response. All the art, the books, the sunrises and sunsets, the movies, the hikes and road trips and flights, the relationships, all that beauty along with all the pain and loss and everything in between, all of that leads us to our own unique translation of this beauty in this form.
And then we rely on words because we are driven to share this experience. Because our individual experience with beauty can’t help but become our shared language.
We wrangle and contort these sensations into words to translate the experience and share it. How incredible, how magnificent, how awe-inspiring that we mere passersby can instantly become artists. We experience a creation of some small magnitude and we engage with it, and alter its form and future.
How can we not translate this beautiful moment? And how can we not leave space for others to translate? And how can we not want to experience others’ translations of this beauty? And how can we not do everything in our power to protect our shared ability to translate beauty? And share it?