Does Beauty Have a Purpose?
- Nina Rodriguez
- Dec 28, 2025
- 6 min read
How Fleeting Moments Teach Us to Truly Live (A Reflection)
If beauty exists, then it must have a purpose, right? But what exactly is it? I wondered as I stared at a houseplant I’ve had for more than seven years.
It had not flowered since the first time I brought it home those years ago, and somewhere along the way, I stopped wondering if it ever would, chalking it up to just another leafy green plant that I happen to water when I notice it turning yellow.
However, I recently moved. And almost without thinking about it, I placed said plant in a corner of the Florida room (sunroom) that turned out to be an accidental sweet spot, perfectly lit and shaded.
I actually forgot it was there, until a new constellation of fuchsia caught my eye.Tip-of-the-pinky-sized pops of color blooming from what I thought was my trusty evergreen houseplant.
In a season when absence feels louder than presence, beauty arrived quietly and insisted on being noticed.
I stood there, and for a brief moment amidst the dense fog that holiday grief brings in the year that has been 2025, everything felt… okay. Joyful, even?
My mind organically quieted (a Christmas miracle in and of itself), fascinated by their inconspicuous arrival, enjoying the effortless presence of being alive at the same time as something beautiful.
And that’s when the question resurfaced:
What is the purpose of beauty?
It can sound indulgent to wonder about this, even silly, considering everything happening in the world. There is incredible suffering and injustice. So much that demands our attention. Who has time to sit around wondering why beauty matters?
And yet, the question stayed with me, as it has for many years.
What is it about beauty that makes men and women write poems that reach across centuries and still speak directly to the hearts of people they’ll never meet?
What stops an artist mid-life to devote themselves to capturing the essence of floating water lilies, eternally preserving them as a symbol for peace across generations?
![The Water Lilies by Claude Monet at The Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. Photo Credit: © 2025 Nina Rodriguez @griefandlight // The Nymphéas [Water Lilies] cycle occupied painter Claude Monet for three decades, from the late 1890s until his death in 1926, at the age of 86. Offered to the French State by Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death. Source: https://www.musee-orangerie.fr/en/node/197502](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/83156a_723a469e7ea745e793fed4b4b4a68c86~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_49,h_28,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_avif,quality_auto/83156a_723a469e7ea745e793fed4b4b4a68c86~mv2.png)
What gathers travelers, total strangers, into shared silence at sunset, as if some unspoken agreement has been made that we’re meant to pause and take this moment in together?
What power is this?
It must have a purpose beyond the obvious.
A Deeper Look
When life is “good,” beauty is easy to overlook. It becomes the visual equivalent of ambient noise. A nice-to-have. Something pleasant but not essential.
That’s when we need reminders to “stop and smell the roses,” as if presence itself were another thing on our to-do list.
But when life gets hard, things shift.
When we experience loss, death or proximity to death, fear, panic, or dread, our senses heighten and attune to a different reality.
Our survival mechanisms activate, searching for stability and predictability in a disorienting, often newly fractured landscape. They desperately look for meaning in the chaos and pain for something that suggests the world hasn’t completely come undone.
And that’s often when beauty finds us, in the smallest, most ordinary moments. Like a plant blooming out of nowhere.
Or the ray of light that met your glass window at the perfect angle to cast a rainbow on your dusty baseboard.
A sound that lands differently than it did before. A scent. An art piece…
Beauty doesn’t fix or resolve the pain. I’m not sure it even has an evolutionary purpose, does it?
(Of course, beauty can serve as a form of attraction for procreation, but that’s not what I’m exploring here. And yes, I could search for answers online, yet ultimately, this is a journey of discovering my own understanding through lived experience and inner knowing. Onward…)
I’ve come to believe beauty exists to give us hope, courage, and a sense of awe, wonder, and connection.
Beauty doesn’t explain itself. It doesn’t demand optimism. It simply reaches out, cups your face, one hand on each cheek, and gently lifts your gaze. It fixes your crown when life has knocked it off. It gives you the strength to try again. And again. And again…
Like Rafiki in The Lion King (1994), it invites you to “look harder”.
There is more to this moment.
There is more than what’s changed and what remains.
It invites us to lean into wonderment, and reflect on what else is true.
Beauty is expansive, connection, communion with the Divine. A form of love.
If beauty is a language of the soul, then it’s also something we learn to hear through the people who taught us how to listen.
As my mother casually said while we were at dinner a few nights ago (loosely translated from Spanish):
“It is the ultimate expression of the soul. To create ‘just because’ is the ultimate expression. It’s nourishment for the soul.”
For context, my mother is a self-taught artist, so she approached the question as both someone who creates beautiful things as a form of self-expression, and as someone who feels nourished by beauty.
Also, she’d likely flinch at me sharing this with you, but trust me, she is an artist in every sense, creating art in all that she does. Check out some of her work:
©2025 Nina Rodriguez @griefandlight // Photos of a handful of art pieces my mom has created throughout the years. From ceramics, to oil paintings, stained glass, to propagating orchids, and making her home a whole 'vibe', she lives and breathes beauty and art.
Maybe beauty is a message from beyond. Maybe it’s a remembering. A felt sense of reassurance that life is bigger, deeper, and more generous than our pain allows us to see when we’re inside it.
As humans, we try desperately to capture, contain, or preserve beauty.
We frame it and hang it on museum walls.
We aim preserve it in photographs and algorithms. (Guilty.)
We consume it as fancy meals, and inject it in our faces. (Not guilty of the latter, yet.)
We curate it, filter it, chase it across continents and pin it to perfect grids.
We also try to preserve it in ourselves, as softness, innocence, or who we were before loss taught us how quickly things can disappear.
And most desperately, we try to trap beauty inside moments, believing that if we hold them long enough, they won’t leave us too.
Photo Credit: © 2025 Nina Rodriguez @griefandlight
Throughout history, we’ve built monuments to it like the Taj Mahal rising from grief, castles carved from stone, sacred geometry in places of worship.
We plant gardens. We design rituals. We turn moments into artifacts, hoping permanence will stay.
But beauty refuses to be owned. It’s ephemeral by design.
Beauty’s impermanence is a feature, not a “bug”.
Beauty invites us into presence and then teaches us how to let go. Even the best photographs don’t fully do it justice.
Beauty is not meant to last, and that's what makes it so meaningful. Holding on is futile, as time and life will do what they do best: change.
“The beauty of today will not look like the beauty of tomorrow,” says the wilting flower in my garden.
And that’s okay. It makes it sacred.
So today, I invite you to notice something beautiful near you, even if life around it feels messy, incomplete, or imperfect.
As the sign in my doctor’s office says, “life doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.”
Sit with it for a moment. Allow yourself to slow down, to breathe, to simply be present. Let it meet you where you are, and let yourself meet it with quiet curiosity. Notice the way it catches your attention, how it makes your chest a little lighter, your mind a little quieter.
Beauty doesn’t demand perfection. It can exist in the ordinary, the overlooked, the fleeting. It waits for us in the noticing, in the space we make for stillness, mindfulness, and presence.
And if you feel called to, share a photo or a reflection in the comments.
Perhaps, in the end, the purpose of beauty exists in the quiet act of noticing. It is letting ourselves be fully present to what is here, right now.
Nina Rodriguez is a Grief-informed Guide, podcaster, writer, and speaker who helps people navigate grief with hope and agency. Following the unexpected loss of her only sibling, Yosef, she founded GRIEF AND LIGHT, an award-winning podcast and supportive online community to educate and empower individuals navigating loss and life-altering change. Through her work and collaborative spaces, Nina aims to foster a more grief-informed, hopeful world. Learn more at: griefandlight.com.