Are you noticing beauty?

This morning, I was walking through Chichester after a coffee with a new friend. I had a few things that I needed to do before heading home, but as I left the cafe, I heard beautiful singing coming from The Cross, the intersection between the main streets of the city centre. Compelled, I walked towards the sound.

There was a woman, dressed casually with a microphone and a case of CD’s, singing Ave Maria. It was incredibly beautiful and all the more moving for me as it is a piece that would always bring tears to my Dad’s eyes. Whenever, he heard it, he would tell me that it was his dad’s favourite aria, which always felt remarkable to me as Grandad was a tough, strong coal miner who had also played professional football for West Bromwich Albion and lived to be 93.

I only had a £20 note in my purse, but it felt so important to me that there was some sort of exchange - that her beautiful voice and the emotions that it brought to me needed to be balanced somehow. I bought something in a shop and dropped some of the change into her case.

I stood off to one side, deciding to stay a bit longer and really soak in the beauty. I had enough time to gift myself another 5 minutes. In that time, I realised how much I had been rushing around, how busy my schedule, and my mind, have been of late.

And it was mirrored back to me. I noticed that almost all of the people who were walking through the space didn’t even look at the woman. It was almost possible to see the ‘elsewhere-ness’ of their focus in the set of their eyes, their face. They were already onto the next thing they needed to do or lost in the thoughts that were crowding their minds. I don’t think it was because they didn’t like opera.

Isn’t it too easy to live like that? For many of us, the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in the world around us are making us shift into a survival mindset. How can I protect myself? How can I protect the people I love? What’s going to happen? We barrel through our lives and our days with a feeling of not really being there at all.

But those 5 minutes of opera did something for me. I remembered that beauty is important, and it is so often freely available.

On the way back home, it was as if a little something had woken up in me and I began to notice, with greater clarity, the amazing blossoms on the sambucus nigra trees ( amazing black-leaved, pink blossomed elder trees). It was as if a mist was clearing.

Studies show that music lights up nearly all of the brain including the amygdala which is our fear and survival centre. It made me think.

When we really tune into the beauty around us, does this give that primal part of ourselves a moment to pause, to let go, to be at ease? Do we get a neurological ‘break’ when those centres are given something else? I always say that there are no accidents in anatomy and nature. The fact that music does that, is by design.

So often, the simple answer is being in the present. Being alive to what is there, right now, in the reality, in the physical.

The breath, the sound, the scent, the colour, the sensation.