Whether we are planning our garden for next spring, laying a stone wall in our yard, or writing our next exercise program, or even putting together that annoying power point for our office incarceration—uh, I mean job—we not only require beauty and creativity, based on a backbone of questioning, but we thrive on it. Without beauty and creativity, we wither away into robotic automatons, mental and physical health starts to fade, and motivation plummets. We question and therefore we create, and when we create, we can improve our lives through beauty.
The necessity of beauty is an unarguable fact of life. Beautiful classrooms promote learning in children while decreasing stress. A beautiful view of nature gets postoperative patients out of the hospital quicker and requiring less pain meds. Houses in beautiful walkable neighborhoods are often double to three times the price of ugly cookie-cutter neighborhoods; this is not by chance, as people vote with their wallets to be surrounded by beauty. Many people view Florence as the most amazing cities in the world, not because it is sitting on the swampy brown, eel-infested Arno River, but rather because it is one of the few places in the world where a walk around town includes a free tour of beautiful Renaissance art and some of the most beautiful buildings in the world. You literally cannot avoid beauty in Florence as it is everywhere as your eyes are inundated with stonework, terra cotta tiles, and Renaissance sculptures. To a degree it is common sense: sitting in a box surrounded by concrete is hardly something we desire. Yet, we get numbed so often by the course of life that many of us end up in a sterile, beauty-less homes and workplace environments where we are instructed to turn off all creativity, leaving us wondering how we got here.
As cities continue to morph into unipolar concrete jungles, where parts of Tokyo, Chicago, New York City, and other major cities around the globe have become barely distinguishable from each other, people continue to leave them. We require oxygen to breathe, physical stress to respond to, sleep to replenish, and beauty to feed our soul. Remove the latter and we feel lost. Creativity and creating beauty serve to further nourish this innate desire to go beyond. Mundaneness and lack of creativity cripples us, cognitively stifling our brains and underwhelming our muscles, nerves, and cells. We must walk on uneven surfaces, large stones, dirt pathways under trees, and cobblestones under arch ways. We require stimulation of our conscious and unconscious nervous system as we navigate the world—a world that is full of twists and turns, an array of colors, shapes and sizes, and unending beauty and creativity. Replace these with flat, mundane, and monotonous concrete and our brains dull, our shins hurt, and the hundreds of nerves that fire and muscles that contract are under-worked. Monotony dulls our nerves and muscles, and weakens the body. A mundane surrounding dulls the soul and weakens the brain.
Until we come to understand these necessities, we will continue to watch antidepressant usage rise (1 in 6 adults in the US has taken an antidepressant in the last 30 days), anxiety will keep climbing, and lust for life flattens as it begins to resemble the gray concrete sidewalks and roads that we continue to paint over the surface of the United States to a degree that would make Le Corbusier proud. But have no fear, the concrete is broken up by buildings made of the leftover parts of Ikea furniture. The impact of our new modern concrete and plastic cities may explain the increase of mental health disorders for the individuals who live in these concrete jungles versus towns or rural areas (there is likely more to this study, but I know where I am putting my money).
We often fight about this and that diet, what we should eat and what we should avoid, when we should eat and when we should fast, which exercise program is the best, and even when we should exercise. Yet, if all of this is done in a mundane vacuum, these conversations may be missing the point. Surrounding ourselves with beauty, questioning and creating, may provide us the ability to escape the literal and figurative concrete confines of the world, the same confines that can leave us anxious and depressed. Our ancestors and the remnants of history tell us that they knew, just as we know, that beauty and creativity are potent medicines to heal the soul—medicines with no side effects, freely available to us all.
Image above by wirestock on Freepik
© 2023 CDR Health and Nutrition, LLC. All Rights Reserved.