Life is beautiful. Just look around you once in a while; it isn’t particularly difficult to see. Look up at the sky, whether the clouds have drifted far away and the subtle warmth cascades down upon you and radiates its glow across your whole body, or whether all you see is a grey palette of blotches, swirling around and preventing such heat from ever reaching you. Perhaps the night has rolled its way across the horizons, and you can glimpse a few of those bright orbs, millions of miles away, beaming with all their might just so that you, an insignificant object to its grand proportions, can be given proof of its existence from an incomprehensible distance away. The sky is a painting of immensurate beauty, if you look at it in the right way. If you could capture its essence in an oil painting, you would have created a piece of sublime art, regardless of the weather.
We can all appreciate this fact about our World; it is incredibly beautiful. And when we think about it from this frame of reference and reverence, we must surely conclude that we, as entities caught within this grand universe, have no right to ever be anything other than delighted at the mere prospect of our existence. Why is it, then, that this is seldom the case? Why and how do we justify our own misery? What makes us so blind to the beauty of all things? For some, it may rarely even be felt; the sheer ponderance of their emotions or points of view corrupt the most obvious facts about the environment around us.
This being said, there are some things to which we are subjected which aren’t as bedazzling as the sky and stars. We live on a planet which we are ruining as a species; which we are greedily and selfishly and lazily pushing further and further towards the brink of annihilation due to our short-sightedness. More locally, we live in imperfect communities which are prone to violence, to disregarding what some perceive as the ‘sanctity of human life.’ Whether or not you personally subscribe to that notion or not. It can often be difficult to not feel afraid for your own safety when strolling through a town late at night or when you hear noises outside which may just be the wind, but may also be someone breaking into your home. Are your fears justified? Of course they are. It is unfortunate that we live in such places in such times with such people to destroy our sense of confidence in the world, but sometimes the wisest course of action is caution.
On an even more local level - the personal level – we, as humans, are flawed. Everyone knows this; we merely need look in the mirror to see it, or think about our past mistakes or the mistakes we are about to make. Such imperfect creatures are we, that we can easily explain our aversion to the picturesqueness which surrounds us.
It is our self-absorption which clouds our perception of the external world for what it is. Not only that, but our perception of reality gets warped and twisted depending on the mood in which we find ourselves. We focus so much on the self that all which falls outside of our small, shallow circle of our person becomes lost on us and wasted.
Our flaws mainly lie in our interpretation of reality; we cannot see beauty when we aren’t in the correct state of mind to experience it. For some, this state is so difficult to attain, and it seems insane how you can stand next to someone and shout “Just look at this! Just think about this! Just spend one second of your pitiful life wondering and pondering this great landscape of impossible things which are somehow our reality! What’s wrong with you; why can’t you open your eyes and see this!” and yet all you point out is lost and your arguments are a waste of breath to the stubborn sufferer, to the one whose own thick-skulled interpretation of the world won’t budge, as they choose to suffer at their own hands.
It’s difficult to blame anyone for not wanting to see the optimistic aspects of nature; sometimes it’s easier to feel bad when we feel bad, instead of shifting our entire alignments and perspectives in order to marvel at all that surrounds us. It is, however, frustrating to the optimistic observer to have to explain beauty to the pessimistic omphaloskeptic, without the possibility of breaching through their stoically narrow view of the world. It is always frustrating when reason and logical argument just don’t penetrate, despite their undeniability. When one point of view is clearly flawed, it is still hard to convince the one who thinks it that they are wrong; as flawed opinions form part of our identity, and to criticising one feels like criticising the other.
Once you can appreciate the amazing things around you more and more readily, once your 'happy place' is actually wherever you happen to be, then you will find that there is a wealth of possibilities out there for replacing misery with curiosity and optimism. We don't have to care about the societal elements of violence and terror, although they will likely always be omnipresent; we can simply get caught up in what a big, beautiful world in which we have the utmost fortune to be.
Our badness and depressive thoughts don’t come from Nature, but from ourselves.
