Only the Fleeting Can Be Truly Beautiful

I was in Valley of Flowers once during blossom season, and there were these tourists - hundreds of them - obsessively photographing every petal, every branch. Trying to capture it, preserve it, make it permanent.

The valley blooms for maybe two weeks. That's it.

And I thought to myself, they're missing the entire point.

The Japanese have built an entire philosophy around this - mono no aware - the bittersweet awareness that things are temporary. Here's what gets me: if those flowers blossoms lasted all year, would anyone care?

Would they still write poems, plan festivals, travel thousands of miles just to stand between them?

Not a chance.

We think we want permanence. We chase it relentlessly - monuments, legacies, relationships that last "forever." But here's the paradox I've learned from living a bit... permanence kills beauty. It suffocates it.

The moment something becomes eternal, it becomes wallpaper. Background noise. We stop seeing it.

Think about your favourite song. You play it on repeat until what? Until it loses that magic. That initial shiver down your spine when the chorus hits - gone. The song didn't change. Your capacity to be moved by the permanent did.

Now think about a sunset. Every single day, same phenomenon, and yet - we stop everything to watch it because we know, right then, in thirty minutes it'll be gone. The light hitting the clouds in exactly that way will never, ever happen again. Not in your lifetime, not in anyone's.

That's the secret nobody wants to admit!

Beauty needs an expiration date.

Youth is beautiful because it doesn't last. First love breaks your heart because it was real but couldn't be forever. Even this moment, right now, you reading these words - it's beautiful because it's happening once. You can read it again, sure, but this precise moment of discovery?

Gone.

I think about my grandmother's hands. Weathered, spotted, temporary. More beautiful to me than any sculpture because I knew - I knew - I had limited time to hold them.

Scarcity creates attention.

Attention creates presence.

Presence creates beauty.

The Greeks understood this. They had two words for time - chronos and kairos. Chronos is the tick-tock, the hours and minutes. Kairos is the fleeting moment, the perfect instant. Divine time. The Greeks built temples to kairos.

We're so busy trying to make things last that we forget to let them matter. We photograph instead of witness. We plan reunions instead of being present at the gathering. We're so afraid of impermanence that we miss the gift it's offering: the chance to truly see.

So here's what I'm saying - if you want to experience real beauty, stop trying to hold onto it. Let it wash over you and vanish.

The ache of missing it afterward? That's not the opposite of beauty.

That's proof it was real.