I heard this lyric in a Derek Trucks Band song this morning and it resonated with me. Things that are beautiful are often crazy.
Consider the following list of people who all either are known for creating beauty or are indeed beautiful themselves and on one level or another are what some would call "crazy":
Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, John Keats, Sylvia Plath, and Tennessee Williams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Ford Coppola, Patty Duke, Marilyn Monroe, Mozart, Schubert, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, James Taylor, Kurt Cobain and on and on and on I could go.
(I'll toss Tyra Banks in here....she's got to be completely crazy!)
Is it possible that in a society and culture that craves and seeks to produce safe, secure, mundane "individuals" that we've lost so much of what it takes to be interesting and beautiful?
We don't even have to talk about people who are clinically defined as mentally imbalanced to see a certain crazy quality about the people credited with do the most beautiful things.
Was Gandhi somewhat crazy to leave India in a revolt through peace, allowing thousands to be abused in the process and urging them never to fight back through physical violence?
I've heard people say many times that Jesus must be the Son of God or be stark raving mad. There's no middle ground with this beauty creator.
How about Mother Theresa? Do sane people give up their whole lives to live amongst the poorest of the poor or must one be just a bit crazy to produce this level of beauty?
What about the guy from the Tiananmen square? You know, the one on this video:
Am I suggesting that we should all hope that we can get a mental disease so that beauty can flourish? No. What I've been wondering for sometime though is whether or not balance and safety are over-rated. Is that really the kind of life that makes a difference or is that a life that we've been made to believe is best?
If being a bit out of balance, even crazy, allows me the create even a fraction of the beauty that many of these people have gifted the world with, count me in. I'm willing to lose my security and balance, even my life, to find a life more beautiful and capable or creating beauty.
