Beauty

This image keeps coming back to me. I'm not sure if this is something I came up with, or something I read in a book or saw in a movie. Whatever it is, this is what has been spinning in my head these days.


There's a little girl, maybe four or five. It is summer. She is outside in a yellow sundress. She looks around her, taking in the green of the grass, the blue of the sky, the white of the clouds, the brown of the trees, the pink of the flowers. She notices the butterflies, the birds. She absorbs this all with a sense of wonder. Then, she starts to cry.

Her mother comes up to her, concerned. She kneels down, puts her arms around the little girl and asks her, ever so tenderly, what's wrong, why is she crying.

The little girl looks into her mother's eyes. Her own eyes are large and full of tears. In between sobs she says, "It's so beautiful, Mommy and I'm sad because you can't see what I see."

It's so beautiful that it makes me sad you can't see what I see.

These days, I feel like that little girl. There's this beauty I can see, that I know is there, that is so apparent, so crystal clear. Yet, it is beauty so intricate, so complicated, so nuanced. I see it, and I want others to see it. So I search for ways to show it to the world around me. I wish I could paint, and yet, the palette of colors that exist don't even begin to mimic what I see with my eyes. I try to write, but my grasp of language seems pedestrian when I try to describe this almost unspeakable beauty.

Look, look, I want to cry out. Just look. Don't you see? Don't you see what I see?

And the answer to that, sadly, is no. You don't see what I see. Not because you don't want to, but simply because you are not me. What I see has been shaped by my past, my experiences, my beliefs. Some of those you share, many of those you do not. The beauty I see, the beauty I exprience, the beauty I know to exist belongs to me. And as desperate as I am to share this, as much as it breaks my heart that you can't see what I see, know what I know, it's a loss that I'm going to have to accept as part of the human experience. For as much as our uniqueness and individuality makes us lively and vibrant as a people, it is also what drives our loneliness.

Our desire for togetherness may be overwhelming, but together will always be something that we consistently have to work at, consistently have to strive towards. Our instinct, rightly or wrongly, will always be to be separate, to be one apart from the other.

Oddly, somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm hanging on to a small sliver of hope. Hope that one day, we will come together at some crossroads and we will come upon beauty. And in some sort of crazy, magical moment, you and I will see exactly the same thing. It'll be a moment so brief that we will always wonder if we imagined it.

But for that brief, fleeting moment, we would know we shared a moment of beauty. And that, in and of itself, would be the most beautiful thing of all.

Stories

Over the past month, I've been collecting stories. Stories of how people got together, of how people come apart, of what happens when love blooms, of what happens when it dies.

I collect these stories, in part, because I want to see if there is a common theme, and in part, because I'm trying to understand this complicated fabric known as "relationships." I've come to realize I know so little about relationships, what makes them work, what doesn't. Why some people can click and why some people can not. Why opposites attract, and similarities repel. I collect these stories hoping that each will give me a clue of some kind of what I'm to expect in my own life.

But if there is one thing I've learnt, is that there are no two stories that are alike. Everyone's story is slighlty different. For every happy ending, that is one that is equally heart-wrenching. For every couple that thought they were perfect for each other, there are an equal number of could never quite make it work. Some couples have come together after adversity, some others have been torn apart. No one's experience mirrors my own -- no matter how similar in personality they are to me.

This is hard for me, not being able to pull a theme from these stories, not being able to have the "to-dos" and "what-not-to-dos" laid out cleanly and neatly for me. It's comforting to have information, to have analytics, "data points," if you will. And yet I know that this points to the intricacy of human nature. No two people, and hence no two stories,are alike. And while these stories that I have heard and gathered educate me to a certain degree, they still don't inform me. At the end of the day, I make my choices, take my own risks, write my own story.

Which leaves me in a place of wondering what my story could possibly be. I worry at times it will be a tragi-comedy. Ever so funny, yet ever so heart-breaking. I worry that each of my desires is just slightly out of my reach and that I will spend the rest of my life just watching the things I want pass on by. These are the stories I write in my head. The ones that are beautiful, poignant, yet bring a little death every time. I'm not sure why these are the stories I invent.

Perhaps it is just more comforting than hoping for a that story with a happy ending -- and being disappointed in the end.

Feelings

On a rare, cool Spring Friday evening in Los Angeles, I find myself wandering the Century City Mall. It's an outdoor mall, an entity I could never understand while I lived in wintry Chicago. But an outdoor mall in Los Angeles makes perfect sense, especially on an evening like this, when the sun takes its time going down, the breeze is cool and gentle, and evening symbolizes not the end of the day, but a promise of the night to come.

The first time I was at this mall was July almost two years ago. It was an evening as well -- but it was summer, and the sun stayed out a little longer, the weather was a little warmer. I had just signed the lease on my Los Angeles apartment. I sat in the open air food court staring up into a clear, blue summer sky and realized that this city was going to be home.

A feeling swept over me then, a feeling I wanted to articulate, but couldn't find anyone to articulate to. The best I could manage was a crackly, disjointed phone call back to Chicago. I tried to share, wanted to say everything that was on my heart -- my excitement, my fear, my hope. Something held me back. Perhaps it was my hesitancy, perhaps I sensed the hesitancy on the other side of the line. Whatever it was, I hung up on the call feeling incredibly lonely and, even though I didn't admit to it at the time, incredibly disappointed.

Walking along the mall at twilight this evening that same feeling from so very long ago swept over me. Why am I even feeling this I wondered. Life today is good. It is full of laughter and filled with hope. I love and am loved by the people in my life. God has been moving me -- where to, I'm not so sure -- but nonetheless His hand is on me, of this I am confident. And yet, as I wandered the mall, it was as if I was back at that summer of two years ago, and loneliness and disappointment came over me again.

I'm never quite sure what to do when old feelings resurface like this. Is it a sign of issues I haven't dealt with? Am I still "holding on"? Should I devote more time to pray over this, journal about it, mourn, cry?

And then I remember something I've learnt over the many years I spent in therapy. Feelings are just that -- feelings. They are not necessarily real. They are not necessarily the truth. They are just perceptions. How many times do the Dr. Phils of the world counsel that we shouldn't just react based on how we feel? That mature adults learn to weigh their feelings, control but not suppress them, know that feelings sometimes can not be trusted.

So I did something that would have made my former therapist proud. I stayed in the moment. I felt. Then I took a deep breath and looked at the truth of my life.

Life today is good. It is full of laughter and filled with hope. I love and am loved by the people in my life. God has been moving me -- where to, I'm not so sure -- but nonetheless His hand is on me.

Of this, I am confident.