Life Lessons

I think it is high time that I tell you how I thought of my idea for the ‘unobserved beauty’ theme for this blog. I would love to just say that I am an amazing person who always saw the good or beautiful before the bad but that is not the case. My path to noticing beauty started when I was riding in a car on my way to church camp. My group was driving through a beat up section of a town. By beat up, I mean, all of the buildings were run down; there was trash on the street; weeds sprouting up everywhere; and, in my mind, it was, well dirty and ugly. That is, until I saw this bright fire engine red door. The door was at the back of someone’s house just barely visible from the road. At first, it seemed to me like such an odd place for such a beautiful door. But after seeing the door, the part of town I was in suddenly seemed to absorb the brightness of the door and become brighter and prettier to me as well. It got me thinking about how many wonderful things go unseen in the world, just because they are in odd places, where no one would think to look. As I continued the car ride, I found myself looking for more of these unexpected items. Once I started looking, I could not stop finding them.

It amazed me how many objects in the world I would consider beautiful when I took the time to look. Most of the items that I found were nothing special, like a fire hydrant or the waves on a sand dune. These are small things that most pass by every day, but when noticed, held true splendor. I have a theory about why this is. It is because they are much more than being beautiful to look at, they often invoke some special feeling or memory which inspires us. Going back to that lovely door, I now realize why I loved that door so much. That door seemed like a beacon of hope. There we were, in a broken, dull area of town, and, out of nowhere, was this vivid door. To me it seemed to say “even in a bad place, magnificence can dwell”. The door was beautiful because it inspired a deeper meaning in me and that was its true beauty.

That is the most valuable lesson that I have learned in my life so far, to look for the beauty in the world. Sure, sometimes, it is easier to see the bad and the ugly but that’s not how I want to see the world. I want to be the type of person who can find beauty in anything, whether it’s a trip to the grocery store, or even a creepy cemetery. True beauty is out there and it is just waiting for someone to find it. I want to be one of the people who go out and find it. As I put my lesson to use, I realized that the more I looked, the easier splendor was to find. In fact, the more beauty I find the less ugly I perceive everything. I hope I remember this lesson and use it for the rest of my life. I encourage all to join me in my search for the unexpected and unobserved beauty in life.
(The picture at the beginning is not the door I was talking about though it is close I did not take this picture)