Beauty remains, even in misfortune,” Anne Frank wrote. “If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.”

It’s what we need in life, in the arts, in sports—the ability to let go , to loosen up, to release the tension that is our obsession with outcomes. Instead, if we reel it in, focusing on the individual steps, embracing the process, giving up the chase , we’ll think better, clearer, because we aren’t thinking so hard. In the face of the Sublime, we feel a shiver . . . something too large for our minds to encompass. And for a moment, it shakes us of our smugness and releases us from the deathlike grip of habit and banality. Yes, we have important duties—to our country, to our coworkers, to provide for our families. Many of us have talents and gifts that are so extraordinary that we owe it to ourselves and the world to express and ful ll them. But we’re not going to be able to do that if we’re not taking care of ourselves, or if we have stretched ourselves to the breaking point…Man is not a machine. Work will not set you free. It will kill you if you’re not careful.” — Ryan Holiday, Stillness Is The Key

There is great peace to be discovered in beauty, says writer Ryan Holiday. It’s all around us in expected places like nature, love and our loved ones but in less-expected ones, too — the smell of asphalt before the rain, dusty pawprints on a car, the fleeting quiet of an empty inbox.

Much of the narrative explored was to do with autonomy over our lives. The "if you manifest better and see the good in it, it is purposeful and you'll grow," kinda feeling. But what about the reality that not everything is within our control? Not everything is an opportunity to grow? It felt very much like stillness was being conceptualised as something that needs to be productive. And the consistent use of second person made it feel like I was being told to see it one way. pas elfis missed,your e ef i out ofsight and your current s i numb. But thse periodic moments arc hidden blesings that validate

And suppose that through letting go, we do find success? When a student hit a bull’s-eye, Kenzo would say, “Go on practicing as if nothing happened.” The closer one is to mastery, the less they care about results. They’re consumed in the process and the actions they control. 2) BATHE IN BEAUTY When the world was at war, while Hitler killed so many millions of people, and as her family spent each day at risk of joining the dead, Anne Frank looked out a small window from the attic above the annex her family hid. “As long as this exists,” Anne thought to herself, “this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad?” Some days it was too dangerous to even open the window. Still, in the suffocating heat, the confined quarters, the unrelatable fear, Anne Frank looked out the window and could find in nature the boost she needed. “Beauty remains, even in misfortune,” she wrote. “If you just look for it, you discover more and more happiness and regain your balance.” She would later write in her diary that nature was a kind of cure-all, a comfort available to any and all who suffer. Indeed, whether it was the blooming of spring or the starkness of winter, even when it was dark and raining, or when it was too dangerous to open the window and she had to sit in the stifling, suffocating heat, Anne always managed to find something to boost her spirits and center herself.We are in the moment like the wind. Everything is ‘now’ – it changes all the time like the wind. The wind blows all the time – from a gentle murmur of a breeze to a hurricane. Sometimes it is a cool gentle breeze; other times it is a strong wind, yet other times it is a whirlwind. Some other times it becomes a storm and some other times a hurricane; between them it is movement and in the center are always moments of stillness. This is what happens,” da Vinci wrote, “to those who leave the solitary and contemplative life and choose to live in cities among people full of countless evils.” The message is not to abandon the world, retreating into a life of complete and utter solitude. No. Holiday’s point is that cultivating moments of solitude, moments alone, moments in silence, moments with only your thoughts are essential. It’s in those moments where clarity and insights are had, where real understanding of ourselves is found, where deep meaning is discovered. Here’s Holiday: no just you, its ot jus the universeies th alliance you share that crees th ife you aspire to experience. BEAUTY IN 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. When we are still, we merge with nature, the Universe, and the Absolute. We go with the wind; we fly with the birds, we float with the waves, we stand with the trees, rise and set with the sun and moon. We change with the seasons; we flow with the rivers, we shine with the stars and orbit with the planets. We are no longer separate from the universe; we become one with everything in the universe, glowing in the beauty and wonder of the universe. Our life becomes very simple and we are in paradise.