Acts of Moral Beauty
The other day I watched an interview on Netflix with On Purpose podcast host Jay Shetty, and Oprah Winfrey. In that extraordinary interview, they talked about acts of kindness and awe that serve as Acts of Moral Beauty.
The visual one witnesses with these acts are random, or perhaps not so random, acts of kindness and goodness. Perhaps other Acts of Moral Beauty are:
- Volunteering to tutor children after school or perhaps serving breakfast for school children before school, children who may not get morning nourishment on an ongoing basis
- Driving a neighbor to and from a medical appointment
- Generosity that looks like someone helping a less-abled person to walk or scooter across the street
- Picking up garbage on the side of the road (making the road beautiful by being a morally beautiful person)
This post from Greater Good Magazine goes so far as to say that just witnessing goodness will most definitely inspire similar goodness in ourselves. Here’s a quote from that article that seems to cover all the bases of moral beauty:
What most commonly led people to feel awe? Nature? Spiritual practice? Listening to music? In fact, it was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming—actions of strangers, roommates, teachers, colleagues at work, people in the news, characters on podcasts, and our neighbors and family members. Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty: exceptional virtue, character, and ability, marked by a purity and goodness of intention and action.
With news blasted over networks and social media structured to draw our eyes and attention to what might be normally considered viewer-worthy, I would like to suggest that the everyday positivity that occurs all around us is far more worthy of our time than anything being packaged as news-worthy on the air.
And wouldn’t it be great if each of us was responsible for ongoing headline-worthy attention? If you agree, won’t you join me and go out there and spruce up our world’s moral beauty?
