Each experience of beauty and love stands alone, different from the rest

By David McElroy · August 18, 2018

When my friend reacted to this sunset photo Friday afternoon, I was so dumbfounded that I didn’t know what to say.

“I always wondered why people take pictures of sunsets, but I guess they’re all different, aren’t they?” he said. “I thought if you’d seen one, you’d pretty much seen them all.”

He might as well have been speaking to me in a language I’d never heard, because nothing about what he was saying made sense. He thought every sunset was alike? But, somehow, looking at this photo I shot Thursday night, he finally noticed that the clouds and sky and color and texture makes everything different? How could someone become an adult and not already realize this?

And then I suddenly realized I was imposing my assumptions on him. I forget that some people don’t see as much, don’t feel as much — don’t experience as much. And it made me long to show those like my friend what they’re missing.

Beauty is infinitely diverse. Every sunset is its own universe. Every tree is a microcosm of all creation and all of life. Isn’t that obvious? How can you see a sunset or a flower or a baby’s face without feeling that you’re having an experience you will never repeat?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that some people are experiencing the world with a much smaller set of tools to evaluate its beauty and majesty. Some people see a home and just experience a pragmatic structure for staying safe from the elements, but some of us experience something of breathtaking organic beauty — something that feeds the soul as well as protecting the body.

Maybe this is why some people buy the most generic, pragmatic “four walls and a roof” which might happen to impress the neighbors, while some of us dream of finding our own Fallingwater experience for life?

Some people paint the world with a small set of emotions, a small set of colors, a small set of ideas about beauty and love. To these people, the world is fairly simple.

Once you’ve seen a pretty sunset, you’ve seen them all.

Once you’ve seen a beach, you’ve seen them all.

Once you’ve seen beautiful design, you might even wonder what the point is.

But that’s not the world I experience. It’s not the world I want to experience.

Every single day is fresh and new in some way. Every leaf and tree branch is unique and beautiful in its own way. Every sunset contains infinite possibilities. Every heart is capable of infinite love if you can just find the key.

Look at the leaves below from my back yard last weekend. They’re perfect. Everything is as Nature intended, from the texture of the body to the intricate network of tiny veins inside which carry moisture and nourishment throughout the entire system. The green is a sensory delight and the overall design is one of nature.

How can anyone and look at this — really look at it — without being astonished to live in a world of such beauty?

There is a lot of ugliness and pain in this world, but it’s primarily one of stunning beauty. I’m in love with the beauty and love and diversity of what Nature created for us to enjoy. I need to experience every day to the fullest. I need to experience every love to the fullest.

No matter how mundane someone else might see a sunset or a flower or a blade of grass, I see the entire universe. I see love. I see the infinite Spirit who created all of it, including us.

I want to drink it all in — and experience all this world has to offer for as long as I can. Otherwise, aren’t you just living the same day or same year over and over again? What’s the point in that?

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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