This postWalking home today, with the melting snow puddles exploding into brilliant kaleidoscopic reflections of the sun wherever I looked, I decided I like winter after all. There’s something remote and poignant about it that makes me feel like I’ve just zoomed out the camera (because of course there’s my life camera watching things from above — manned by my guardian angel — not to mention the background soundtrack) and suddenly I’m in some antarctic wilderness with nothing around (not even penguins) for hundreds of miles. Just wind, snow, sun, and me.
It’s times like this that I remember that there’s beauty in pretty much everything, if we only have eyes to see it. (Disclaimer: every normal thing. There are twisted evils that have no beauty in them whatsoever, but we’re not talking about them.)
Getting into photography this past year has taught me that, if nothing else. You really can find beauty in almost anything — in a slab of concrete sidewalk, in a moldy apple barely dangling from its mother branch, in forty yards of magnetic tape strewn over your front lawn (I still don’t know who does it, but it happens every few months), in every creature and every plant on this earth and all the others.
Conversely, you can find ugliness and irritating imperfections in almost anything, too. Life ain’t pretty. Nobody’s perfect. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
But while some cling to any excuse they can scrape together to focus on the negative, I prefer liking life, thank you very much.
And you know, it’s up to me. True, my perception of reality doesn’t actually alter it (even though I wish I could do telekinesis :P), but it does change me. It’s a choice. Heck, to fall in with modern parlance, it’s a lifestyle.
Now, I don’t think that anyone is 100% polarized at either end of the optimism/pessimism spectrum. We’re all a grab bag with some black marbles and some white. While we can’t get rid of all the black ones, we can decide to paint most of them white. Seeing the beauties in life doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t distort reality, either, contrary to the opinions of the pessimists. The good is there in just as much force as the bad. And since happiness is a choice, we may as well choose to see the good. It just makes sense.
Besides, when we’ve got our eyes trained, life is so much more fulfilling. Joys follow you around wherever you go. Even your sorrows are tinged with gold and light around the edges. It’s not a way to escape the bad things in life, mind you — it’s a way to deal with them that puts you in control, not the other way round. You go through your trials in this ship of light, so to speak, not away from them. And while the darkness batters you till you feel like you’re almost dead, as soon as you pass through it, the light flies in and surrounds you and then you’re changed, refined, and lifted to a higher level of existence. Those accustomed to see only the darkness, however, find that when they get through their trials, that’s exactly what meets them.
The difference between the two is like that between slumber and wakefulness. Real life is so much sharper and clearer than dreams, which usually start to get fuzzy and blurred as soon as you wake up.
All of this reminds me of a passage in C.S. Lewis’s 1947 essay “On Stories” that I seem to keep coming back to over and over again (the bold is mine):
If some fatal progress of applied science ever enables us in fact to reach the Moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories. The real Moon, if you could reach it and survive, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else. You would find cold, hunger, hardship, and danger; and after the first few hours they would be simply cold, hunger, hardship, and danger as you might have met them on Earth. And death would simply be death among those bleached craters as it is simply death in a nursing home at Sheffield. No man would find an abiding strangeness on the Moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden. ‘He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’
Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.
