A Beautiful Closure

There was a moment.

Dawn.

The birth of a new day.

It was the 8th day of our visit back 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.

I arose early and walked outside at 6:15 AM to catch a glimpse of the sights and sounds that I missed both in my dreams and in my 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 of it), the sound of the birds, the snow and glaciers on the peaks, and the silence.

Standing in the presence of this kind of beauty can bring about the intense and innate feelings of what it means to be alive. To be in creative tension. To be 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 that was before me and instead enjoyed it. In a lot of 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 to be “useless”.

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

In a world when things such as the good, the true, and the beautiful become more and more subjective, this experience reminded me not only how untrue those sentiments really are, but just how objective this experience was.

It seems to me that when beauty, truth, or goodness become subjective in nature we tend to grasp and hold onto these things as our own. We tend to use them for our own purposes and for our own 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 and all of these things are meant to be “useless”, therefore stripping away our ulterior motives. Anything we truly love does this. For 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.

At that moment as I walked away, it was less about turning my back on the beauty, the memories spent in Switzerland, or the deep friendships that we have made. Rather, paradoxically it was a moment when I was able to walk towards a deeper love for all of it.

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

Such truth in that. Such goodness in that. 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.