Beauty is All That Matters

We live in a world where discovering flaws and complaining about everything have become parts of our day-to-day routines.

Take a look at this majestic view of Puy-de-Dôme and you’ll see what I mean. The world is beautiful.

In fact, the ugliness we notice about the world has led a lot of us to feel demotivated and easily fall into the pangs of hopelessness. We have unconsciously learned to stop fighting when we feel like darkness has overtaken the shining light that helps us get going. Indeed, it’s very easy to feel sad and angry about different aspects of our lives and what we see and encounter every day.

This is me speaking as a survivor (and still surviving) from a series of unfortunate events (mostly caused by my own irresponsibilities) in my 25 years of existence. I know what it feels like to be caught up in darkness and silently weeping as I held that twine around my neck contemplating whether this should be where my story ends. I understand the feeling of walking around with my head hanging over my shoulders questioning how I led myself into destruction. “Why are all these things happening to me?” was a question that silently echoed back and forth in the walls of my mind. I didn’t want to admit it then, but I was a total mess.

Then, I started hating the world and people. On the outside, I was seen as a happy being because I always liked to laugh (even until now). But at the end of the day, I would always find myself complaining. I spewed out too much negativity that I wondered if I ruined days of friends that I talked to. I even reached the point where I became disgusted at how negative I have become.

At that moment (and after a few doses of putting myself out there and traveling to places), something hit me. I realized that as humans, we are naturally gifted with two lenses: one for witnessing the beauty in everything and the other for seeing what’s wrong with our lives and this world. The thing is we can make choices as a bonus, but it makes me wonder why we never or rarely take advantage of it. Maybe, it’s because it’s easy to feel sad than be happy and end up falling into disappointment. But we’re humans and that’s what we’re programmed to do, pick ourselves up when we fall and look through not just one but both of those lenses.

So I told myself that maybe, it’s time to pry my eyes open to silver linings and look away from the misfortunes for a moment. And maybe, if…