Jasmine in Dust and the Responsibility of Seeing
The jasmine plant on our balcony bloomed during the worst week of last month. The city was choking on construction dust, the newspapers full of violence, my mother’s death anniversary approaching with its familiar weight. And there, impossibly, these small white flowers opened themselves to a world that seemed determined to destroy anything tender.
I stood there at dawn, coffee growing cold in my hands, wondering if beauty in an ugly world is mercy or mockery.
Beauty, I’ve learned, isn’t neutral. It makes demands on us. It insists we notice, forces us to pause in our practiced numbness, refuses to let us sleepwalk through existence. When everything around us screams that hope is naive and tenderness is weakness, beauty arrives like an uninvited guest, demanding we remember what we’re fighting to preserve.
But remembering hurts. There’s a reason we develop armor against beauty—it makes us vulnerable to loss. Every time I let myself fully see the way evening light transforms our small apartment, I’m also seeing how temporary this is, how fragile. Every time I allow myself to be moved by Arash’s laughter or the careful way Happy arranges our few flowers, I’m acknowledging what could be taken away.
This is why beauty feels so heavy in an ugly world. It’s not just aesthetic pleasure—it’s evidence of what’s possible, what we’re capable of creating when we choose creation over destruction. But it’s also evidence of our failure to choose creation more often.
I think of the craftsman who carved the intricate patterns on the old mosque near our house—hundreds of hours of meticulous work creating something unnecessary, something purely for the sake of beauty. He lived in the same world of injustice and suffering we inhabit, yet he chose to add beauty rather than ugliness. His decision haunts me because it raises uncomfortable questions about my own choices.
In Sylhet, during our last visit to Happy’s family, I watched her grandmother tending roses in a garden surrounded by poverty. When I asked why she bothered with flowers when vegetables would be more practical, she looked at me as if I’d asked why she bothered breathing. “Beauty feeds something vegetables cannot,” she said.
She understood what I’m still learning: that beauty isn’t luxury—it’s resistance. In a world that profits from our despair, that wants us numb and consuming and hopeless, the decision to create or preserve or notice beauty is an act of rebellion. It’s saying no to the ugliness that wants to convince us it’s all there is.
Yet beauty also carries the weight of responsibility. Once you’ve seen it, once you’ve let it matter to you, you become its guardian. You can’t unsee the light that transforms ordinary moments into something transcendent. You can’t unknow that human beings are capable of creating extraordinary tenderness amidst extraordinary cruelty.
Last year, during the floods, I watched neighbors sharing food with strangers, children playing in muddy water with infectious joy, volunteers working eighteen-hour days for no reward except the knowledge that they were choosing compassion over indifference. The news showed only the destruction, but I witnessed daily acts of beauty—not the aesthetic kind, but the moral kind, the kind that reminds you what our species is capable of when we remember who we want to be.
This is perhaps the heaviest thing about beauty in an ugly world: it makes complicity impossible. Once you’ve experienced what humans can create together—art that moves you to tears, communities that care for their vulnerable, moments of understanding that bridge seemingly impossible differences—you can’t pretend that ugliness is inevitable. You know we’re choosing it, day after day, and you know we could choose differently.
Beauty in an ugly world is also a form of time travel. When I read Rumi or listen to a Bach fugue or watch the precise way Happy folds our clothes, I’m connecting with human beings across centuries and continents who refused to let ugliness have the final word. They’re proof that beauty survives, that it finds ways to root itself even in the most hostile soil.
But survival isn’t enough anymore. Beauty needs advocates, guardians, people willing to carry its weight even when—especially when—the world insists it’s frivolous or naive. Every time we choose to create rather than destroy, to notice rather than ignore, to preserve rather than discard, we’re adding our voice to this ancient conversation about what kind of world we want to inhabit.
The jasmine on our balcony has finished blooming now. The flowers have fallen, become part of the soil that will feed next year’s growth. This too is beautiful—the way beauty transforms itself, never truly disappearing but changing form, teaching us that nothing lovely is ever truly lost.
Tonight, as I write this with the sound of traffic and construction and human discord filtering through our windows, I’m thinking about that craftsman who carved unnecessary patterns on the mosque walls. He knew his work wouldn’t solve the world’s problems, wouldn’t end injustice or suffering. But he also knew that in a world trying to convince us we’re nothing but animals competing for resources, acts of unnecessary beauty are proof of our capacity for transcendence.
The weight of beauty in an ugly world isn’t punishment—it’s privilege. We get to carry evidence of what’s possible. We get to be proof that humans can choose creation over destruction, tenderness over cruelty, hope over despair.
The question isn’t whether beauty matters in an ugly world. The question is whether we have the strength to carry its weight, to be worthy of the responsibility it places on us, to add our own small acts of creation to the long human project of making existence more beautiful than it has to be.
