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A Beautiful Closure

There was a moment.

Dawn.

The birth of a new day.

It was the eighth day of our return to Switzerland, and the first rays of sunlight illuminated the mountain peaks of Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau, or “the Big Three,” as we like to call them.

Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau

I arose early and walked outside at 6:15 AM to catch a glimpse of the sights and sounds I missed in my dreams and conscious thoughts since we moved back to the States. As I began to walk the narrow paths and streets of Mürren, Switzerland, I rediscovered that deep sense of awe that had struck me so many times before. The air, the changing colors in the sky (which changed every second if you took your eyes off it), the sound of the birds, the snow and glaciers on the peaks, and the silence.

Standing in this kind of beauty can bring about intense and innate feelings of being alive—of being in creative tension, caught and suspended between grandness and stillness, magnitude and peacefulness, infinite and finite. This moment was no different.

I have looked at these sights countless times before. Scanning north, south, east, and west, I knew the names of the surrounding mountain peaks in the Bernese Oberland region, even if I still couldn’t pronounce them correctly. I knew the train schedules. The lift schedules. I knew the Coop grocery store and the Chinese restaurant in the middle of the village. I felt at “home” just as much as I feel at “home” in the U.S.A.

Yet…something was different.

There seemed to be a moment. A moment when I let go—a moment when I stopped grasping at the beauty before me and instead enjoyed it. In many ways, it was a moment when I saw the mountain peaks that I knew so well for the first time. For it was a moment when my soul finally found them “useless.”

It was the moment when I was able to turn around and walk away.

In a world where the good, the true, and the beautiful have become increasingly subjective, this experience reminded me not only of how untrue those sentiments are but also how objective they were.

When beauty, truth, or goodness become subjective, we tend to grasp and hold onto them as our own. We tend to use them for our purposes and our ego. Thus, we never fully enjoy what lies before us.

What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things instead of using people and loving things.

-Zelda Fitzgerald

Whether it be nature, art, or, most of all, people and our relationships, the beauty, truth, and goodness found in any of these things are meant to be “useless,” therefore stripping away our ulterior motives; anything we genuinely love does this. If love is willing the good of the other, as other, and not what we want them to be or what they can do for us, we are left with who and what they are. To be loved. To be enjoyed. To be.

As I walked away, it was less about turning my back on the beauty, the memories spent in Switzerland, or our deep friendships. Instead, paradoxically, it was a moment when I could walk towards a more profound love for all of it.

For many people, closure means different things. For me, it means not necessarily a new beginning but a new way of seeing, being, and loving. It’s enjoying “the new wine in new wineskins.”

There is much truth in that. There is such goodness in that. There is such beauty in that.

I guess, in the end, gratitude is the place we all want to end up.

I certainly am grateful for the moment that brought beautiful closure.

In search of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Here are some moments along the way.

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