We can choose to seek many different destinations:
- Novelty
- Satisfaction
- Curiosity
- Distraction
- Dissociation
- Connection
- Peace
- Conflict
- Comfort
One of the main lessons I seek to imbue my students with is to make the destination you seek beauty.
Prioritize seeking beauty.
To me, the outcome of all art should be beauty. It can be ugly beauty, it can be chaotic beauty, but whatever it is, nevertheless, it can be beauty.
Teach your students, above all, to seek beauty. Look for it more than you look for properly diagrammed sentences, properly understood just tuning, properly interpreted poetry, properly performed stoichiometric equations.
Above all, seek beauty. Seek it, train your brain to value it more than comfort or conflict, more than satisfaction or novelty.
If we normalize seeking beauty, we can find it every day. And a day with beauty in it is a joyful day, indeed.