Lessons from My Mother: Beauty that Changes Your Life

This article is part of a series reflecting on my values and how they continue to shape the decisions I make as a person, mother, friend, colleague, leader.

Today’s topic is what my mother taught me about the nature of beauty, and what it means to say it can change your life. A bold statement, but one I hold with conviction.

This learning started when I was young, watching how my mother responded to things she found beautiful around her, using all the senses. It was how we would stand, transfixed, listening to the Three Tenors hit the notes from Nessum Dorma. It was when she called me to come see an orange sunset splintered across green terraced ricefields, or when she treated me to breakfast in bed as a grumpy teenager and the tray was decorated with flowers or arranged leaves. It was “smell this!” or “look there!” or “have you felt how soft this is?” My mother showed me to live in world full of color and texture, light and shadow, the tinkling of wind chimes in a cool summer breeze with the warmth of the sun on your skin.

As I’ve grown older, we like to share beauty through poems. There is one particularly that stands out, on the nature of beauty itself, from one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. In “The Swan”, she paints the portrait of a white swan, “a perfect commotion of silk and linen”, gliding across the black water at night. Mary Oliver ends with this statement:

“And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?”

I realize that beauty can be viewed as a luxury with uneven access – whether that’s fresh skies, elegant architecture, high fashion, manicured landscapes, clean scents. It feels privileged to be able to speak about beauty, when so many of us are facing experiences that can only be described as tragic, unjust, and ugly. We need only turn on the news for this.

And yet,?I do not believe I speak from a place of comfort and privilege to be talking about the importance of beauty. I have three reflections.

(1) The first lesson I’ve learned is that Beauty asks us to look for it, actively.?Beauty wants to be found – even in the face of ugliness. Perhaps especially in the face of ugliness.

I did not grow up privileged enough to live in a nice home, have nice things, wear nice things. We did not lack; I had all my basic needs met. But when I was young, I lived in a village on the outskirts of Bandung, Indonesia, in a “kampung” house with no phone, no shower, where we boiled water on the stove to take a “splash bath” and had few material possessions. When in high school, back in America, I wore thrift store t-shirts and always looked just a little bit odd.?

And yet,?beauty was all around me. My heart still aches for the kaleidoscope of green in West Java, the wildness and humidity of it, the view of bamboo and smog and bursting hills after I’d slid my way up and down muddy paths, soaked and refreshed by monsoon season. I still remember dancing to Flight of the Bumblebee spinning spinning?spinning?as if my little 8-year-old legs could carry me into a whole other world.?

When I was twenty, I worked for a summer in Nouakchott, Mauritania, at a maternal and child healthcare clinic. I remember my senses being shocked: dead cattle left deflating to earth, flies crowded around children’s faces, Sahel dust swirling. The landscape was devastatingly barren. Driving south along the coast I was surprised to see what has been described as a graveyard of abandoned ships.?

And yet,?while the men were typically in blue or white, the women wore long, draped melahfas, the fabrics replete with rich color and geometric patterns. The 300 rotting ships along Nouadhibou’s coastline were striking: the sharp, dark angles of their masts askew against the sky, their salt-rusted hulls arching from the sand. The children jostled each other to race to greet us with high-pitched trilling and laughter.

Marcel Proust summarizes it well:?“The real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”?

(2) The second lesson I’ve learned is that Beauty challenges us to create it around us and for others.?Especially if we have access, and the chance to do so. And I think this can be done in a variety of ways, which I’ll label spaces, faces, and experiences.

First, the beauty of?place and?space. In 2010, Ipsos researchers ran both quantitative and qualitative ethnographic fieldwork in Sheffield, England, focused on the subject of beauty (FN1). One thing they asked was who had responsibility for beauty. For the most part, people concluded that responsibility for beauty was shared, with each individual playing a role and having a duty to themselves and others. However, they acknowledged the important role that local authorities and town councils had in leading by example and safeguarding beauty in their town.

If this is clear for our cities, it is equally clear for our professional spaces. At my previous employer, Capital One , we made massive investments in workplace design, focusing not only on the efficiency of space but also its beauty, to include investments in art and aesthetic materials. At Philip Morris International , many of our newer facilities also bear this hallmark, especially our London Global Studio or the U.S. offices opening in Connecticut. When you enter an office that has been curated to create a personal, open, and beautiful space, it creates a different feeling than sitting across from a dark, stark desk.?

Second, the importance of?faces. Another thing concluded in the Ipsos research was that “people – their mood and manners – can literally transform a place into one of beauty”, and that “happy, smiling people created an environment of beauty.” Company cultures are influenced by things like mood and manners; I would say that it’s beyond just “how things work around here” and includes how people literally,?physically, show up.?

For example, the power of the smile is well documented in research. A 2005 study by Penn State?concluded that smiling service industry employees made more positive impressions on their customers than those who did not smile (FN2). Another 2012 study by the University of Pittsburgh demonstrated the linkage between smiling and being perceived as trustworthy, with bigger smiles inducing more trust (FN3). If a smile is a thing of beauty, and one that can influence others and build trust, isn’t this something to reflect on further in our company cultures?

Third, the extension into?experiences. At the end of last year, we had a leadership team offsite in Lucerne, Switzerland. A beautiful location to be sure, but our leader, Charles Bendotti , chose an outdoor activity for us which included walking with torches through the dark woods, to a place where we could watch the moon rise. It was November and the trees were black lace against the sky, over a bowl of fog coating the lake, brushed against the mountains. This is the photo shown in the article cover. A memorable way to spend time with my colleagues. Similarly, when I was able to bring my team together recently, we found ourselves in a remote location in Poland near the ruins of an old castle, and we made sure to have a variety of outdoor activities that allowed us to inhabit and experience the space.

Beauty matters, at work as in life. And if we have the chance to do so, we can influence and create: spaces, faces, experiences.

(3) The third lesson I’ve learned is that Beauty invites us to pause.?Especially if you’re moving quickly. Because beauty requires that you rest.?

It’s not just an adage: “take time to stop and smell the flowers”. It’s neuroscience; it is literally how we are hard-wired:

• A 2005 study from Rutgers University demonstrated that smelling flowers was a mood manipulator, acting as medicine for the brain that made people happier (FN4)
• ?The University of Kent in?2022 published a study showing that the smell of fresh cut grass or blooming flowers appears to have a positive effect on a person’s overall wellbeing, and that smells of nature can help to boost psychological wellbeing?(FN5)
• ?A recent article published by IAM Lab (which focuses on the field of neuroaesthetics) on the “neuroscience of scent” summarizes a range of research that points to how pleasant aromas not only make us happier but can also enhance our health by reducing anxiety (FN6)

The only way to achieve these benefits is to pause, to absorb. And even with an eye trained to find and see beauty, you must still create moments of space to take it in.

In these moments of slowing down, this is the world I’m now painting for my daughters. It’s pausing to feel the softness of the moss on the trail near our house. It’s pointing to the swans sliding in front of a giant metal fork rising from the lake in Vevey, refracting the twilight clouds, or to the yawning yellow moon on Lac Leman beside the twinkling Evian docks. It’s looking deeply into the almond ovals of my daughter’s hazel eyes (Oh, My Little Love, you are so radiantly, effervescently beautiful.) Perhaps the thing that makes me happiest now is when I hear them say “Mama, mama, come see the sky!” and they drag me outside to watch the sunset.?

This is the world my mother taught me to live in. Like when we went to the immersive Van Gogh experience in Avignon, France, and she said with the hushed whisper of church: “I just want to take all this beauty and tuck it away in my heart.”?

Beauty has taught me several lessons. I have learned to find it all around me. I have looked to create that beauty for myself and others. And I keep leaning my way into finding the stillness necessary for that mindful, full-hearted embrace of beauty.?

“And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?”

Footnotes (FN)

(1) Link to research:?https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/fileadmin/uploads/dc/Documents/people-and-places.pdf

(2) Alicia A. Grandey, Glenda M. Fisk, Anna S. Mattila, Karen J. Jansen, Lori A. Sideman, Is “service with a smile” enough? Authenticity of positive displays during service encounters, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 96, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 38-55, ISSN 0749-5978,?https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2004.08.002

(3)?Schmidt K, Levenstein R, Ambadar Z. Intensity of smiling and attractiveness as facial signals of trustworthiness in women. Percept Mot Skills. 2012 Jun;114(3):964-78. doi: 10.2466/07.09.21.PMS.114.3.964-978. PMID: 22913033.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22913033/

(4)?Haviland-Jones, J., Rosario, H. H., Wilson, P., & McGuire, T. R. (2005). An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers.?Evolutionary Psychology,?3(1).?https://doi.org/10.1177/147470490500300109

(5)?Bentley, P.R., Fisher, J.C., Dallimer, M.?et al.?Nature, smells, and human wellbeing.?Ambio(2022).?https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-022-01760-w

(6) Link to article:?https://www.artsandmindlab.org/the-neuroscience-of-scent/