The things we love are beautiful because we love them. As a people, we assign beauty and give it meaning.
The gray plastic shopping bag being blown across the street like a tumbleweed can be – and is – as great a sight as any of the earth’s natural wonders. Its simplicity and mundanity can evoke such feelings as looking over the peak of a grand mountain. Sublimity is the result of a state of mind, not an environment.
But this sublimity, like everything, comes and goes. As trees grow green in the spring and lose their leaves in the fall, so do we remember and forget the beauty of the world around us.
It’s not that beauty fades or becomes any less—it is always there in the eyes of people we pass on the street and the dust-covered rocking chair in the corner of the attic—but our minds do not allow us to perceive its presence. The terror that exists despite the promise of humanity is adept at blinding us to the wonderfully simple goodness that the connection of living things can offer.
Our mere presence when standing beneath an oak tree is enough to send torrents of joy around the globe. When we take the time to appreciate the little things, our serene satisfaction is passed to every living creature with which we come in contact. It expands past our knowledge and outlives us by many years.
It is shocking, really, the number of people who never learn what beauty means or how to find it. It is not hard, but they have only been conditioned to see roses and sunsets as beautiful, not the produce aisle of the local grocery store when a light is flickering a particular way above the potatoes. It can never be the glass of water in their hand, only the coffee with the milk frothed just right.
But that’s what I don’t understand: why is anything ever more beautiful than another? Why is death an ugly, dreadful thing and life the wonder that comes before?
It’s the age-old question: why live when we are bound to die? Why love when they’ll all die too?
How can people stand to dance in kitchens and laugh without a care when their whole worlds can be gone in a matter of moments? Not only how can they stand it: how can they enjoy it, draw satisfaction from it?
(It, it, it. Is my idea of the matter so abstract that I can’t even find a proper word to convey my meaning? Maybe so. I have never been logical.)
But all these people. What do they think?
Or are they all secretly like me? Scared to death—scared of death—but putting all of their energy into not letting it show?
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