The Beauty in Life

Dear reader,

I have a confession to make.

I am in love with the world. It is a mad and hopeless kind of love – the love that cannot be explained or defined. I can’t say how much I love the world, or why I love the world, or for what reasons I love the world. I can only say that I smile at the stars and look at the clouds and wonder how something could be so beautiful and so imperfect at the same time, and I fall more and more in love with the mystery of it every day.

I am forever the optimist. My eyes are constantly peeled for the beauty in life, and they find it everywhere. It does not often cling to the surface, but it is there. I love seeing warmth and wholeness in everything around me. I like to wonder. I like to create. I like to be in love with the world.

But there are many who would look me in the eye and ask me: how could I love this world, so flawed and imperfect? So tragic and damning? So dark and despairing and lost? How could I find beauty in ugly places where it does not exist, and marvel at goodness and purity that is only an illusion – nothing more than a thin veil of lies I’ve spun in my own mad reality of believing dreams come true and love is endless and infinite?

And yet I find it difficult not to be in love with the world when I wake up in the pale, breathless hours of the morning when the sun’s rays haven’t quite touched my window yet, and the air is almost chilly, and the covers are nearly touching me, and my eyelashes flutter open from a dream and I smile because the world is almost perfect in this moment. Almost, not quite. But close enough, for me.

Yes, I really love the world.

And sometimes it’s a scary thing to admit, this love. Because not everybody sees it. And people will judge you for it. They might think that you’re ignorant. Worse still, they might try to convince you you’re wrong. Say you’re a hopeless romantic. Nothing but a sad and tragic poet, who clings to the work of Tyler Knott Gregson every night and cries because it is so beautiful and really doesn’t do anything with their life at all but think things are beautiful and write things that are beautiful.

But maybe the sad and tragic poet isn’t so sad and tragic after all. There is beauty in life for those who are willing to see it.

And that is why I write – to create beauty, so that one day, some person unknown to me will find it within my words and come to see the world in a different way. There is so much to fixate on that is ugly and bad. So much that is almost perfect, but isn’t. We can either chose to accept the fact that anything worth loving will always be nearly perfect, or we can live in bitterness because of that “not quite”.

We can either admire the light or begrudge it for the shadows it creates.

So, dear reader, I hope you can always find the beauty in life. I hope sometimes you’re given the chance to create beauty, and when you are, I hope you take it. I hope you put light out into the universe. I hope you love people, and I hope people love you. I hope you have dreams, and I hope those dreams come true for you. I really hope you can find happiness here in this lovely, confusing world of ours.

And above all else, I hope that you can one day come to love it as I have.

Forever yours,

A not-so-sad-and-tragic poet