To still the mind is an impossible task. For what is it to be within a moment? By the time one has noticed the beauty of a moment, it has already fled. The trick then, must perhaps be to avoid noticing the moments! But where is the beauty in a life lived solely in memory?
Even memory is elusive and deceptive! No sooner than a moment is over does the subconscious mind begin to fill the gaps of perception with false narratives. And even more, as one tries to recall, a thick fog drifts over the mind's eye, orphaning the lonely remnants of true beauty.
Where does beauty lie its head to rest? The future? No, this cannot be so! There, beauty becomes an ideal, a toy for hopeful fools, a slave to the fancies of man. But, is beauty any more than just an ideal? I do not speak of the ideal, that is to say a unified perfection, but of a fragment.
We are undeserving! For on our own it seems we are incapable of grasping beauty without causing its destruction. Perhaps, with humility, it is not meant for us to possess or own. Instead, apart from our individual selves, as vessels, and with time, we as a collective humanity can know what beauty is! Towards such a reality, legacy, in its nature, can memorialize beauty, though, risks desecrating it in prideful expressions of individuality.
And so, in these ways, it appears that we are mere vessels, utilizing our broken memories and approximating legacies to form hopeful ideals, from which momentary realized instances of beauty can emerge to be witnessed, continuing this cycle. For perhaps beauty itself is alive and on a journey of its own, and we are simply the winds that it rides.