Beauty and love are all around us if our eyes and hearts are open to them

It’s easy for me to get depressed about the state of things in this fallen world. Everywhere I look, there’s ugliness, ignorance and hatred. Those things are very real. But if all we see is the squalor in the world, we’re missing the love and beauty that were put all around us to experience. They’re very real, too.

I’ve seen evidence of the very bad and the very good this week, and I’m constantly trying to reconcile the two. It seems that the more you feel one of the extremes, the more you’re capable of experiencing the other extreme.

From talking to others, I suspect that I experience both extremes more strongly than most. The things that hurt me don’t just disappoint. They wound something really deeply, even if it’s something that wouldn’t affect others. I’ve never liked that about myself, but I suspect that if I didn’t feel so deeply about the hurtful things, I wouldn’t feel the beautiful things so strongly.

I started thinking about this Friday night as I drove west on I-20 in Birmingham just barely after sunset. I came over the top of a hill and suddenly had a vast open space ahead of me with hills in the distance. The fading sunset was a pinkish orange hanging just above the black of the hill contours.

It was breathtaking to me. It wasn’t just beautiful. It was something that touched me emotionally. For that moment, all the ugliness of the world was gone. All the problems of daily life were gone. I felt content, at peace and as though I was experiencing something God put in front of me — just for me.

When I feel the other side — the negative side — of this emotional experience, it’s easy to stay there. I’ve been guilty of seeing the negative, getting scared and then not pulling myself out. I’ve lost some things that mattered to me as a result, simply because I experienced the negative side of something too long and couldn’t balance it with the positive that was just as real.

Most normal people’s emotions seem to have a narrower range than mine do. Their highs aren’t nearly as high and their lows aren’t nearly as low. Because of that, it seems as though many people (maybe even most) are oblivious to many things that seem obvious to me. I have no idea why. I just know that I can’t not feel — and I know the feelings aren’t always easy to control.

Honestly, though, I don’t want to change what I feel, because the feelings are who I am. If you took away the intensity of my feelings — of what I experience and what I feel in others — I would be left with a steady but boring and unlivable life. It would be like getting an emotional lobotomy or becoming autistic. I couldn’t understand people. I couldn’t feel life.

All of this brings me to a topic that I find myself constantly revisiting, even though it’s not even close to the political, economic and social ground we normally cover here. The question is where art comes from.

I constantly find myself seeing beautiful things and taking pictures of them, yet having the people with me not even notice the thing that has caught my attention until after I show them. I constantly end up with photos that are lovely, but which are just dim shadows of the beauty I see with my eyes. Yet until I point to it, many people don’t notice. Why?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s because I’m an extremist with my emotions. I suspect it’s because I feel something in a sunset or a tree or a cat or even a woman’s face that most normal people don’t feel. And this explains why I’m always so embarrassed when people praise photos I’ve taken. I feel like a fraud, because I know that I didn’t create anything. I simply saw what was already there and pointed the camera and framed the shot in the best way I could. In anything beautiful that I might create — and maybe that anyone creates — I’m not sure that we create beauty. I suspect that we simply notice it — whether with our eyes or with the mind’s eye — and find some artistic medium in which to record it.

There’s always going to be ugliness and hatred around us. We live in a fallen world where those things are rampant. But we don’t have to be discouraged and afraid that the ugliness is what the world is really about. As long as we learn to balance the good and the bad — and as long as we can remain in control of the intensity that threatens to overwhelm some of us — we can focus on good things.

We can choose to see the beauty and feel the love that’s all around us — if our brains and hearts are open to feeling what’s really there.

Note: The pictures with this article are random examples of beauty that I see around me. The top photo is a gorgeous sky that appeared outside of a fast food restaurant where I was eating a few months ago. The leaves are from a tree on my street last week. The picture of the large tree at sunset was taken a few blocks from my house last year. The sunset below was over part of downtown Birmingham last year. All four were taken with my iPhone.