How to find beauty everywhere you look
…and feel a little bit happier about life.
Happiness is easy.
Boo! my depression and anxiety shout — but happiness is easy.
Finding it, though? Not always so easy.
Big, happy events in my life are great. Birthdays, Christmas, getting the job, nailing the interview, landing a client… they’re great. Really. But I find that most of my happiness comes from the little things in life. To do that, you kind of have to be looking for them.
There’s so much beauty in this world. There’s a lot of pain and destruction too, yes — but there is more beauty.
I wrote an entry for the Medium Writers Challenge. I think it’s fairly good, actually, if I do say so myself (and I usually don’t) and I’d recommend giving it a read — but at the bottom, I include a couple of stills from a video I took one day during the first lockdown. I was in a really bad place, and I’d walked aimlessly and without consciousness until I found myself in the middle of the common land near my house. If you don’t know what that is, it’s large grassy fields, ponds, thickets and woods. I sat in the middle of it, feeling very scared and alone, angry and confused, and I looked for something beautiful. I needed it, at that point.
I was sat by the spring end of a brook that runs through the common, and there was a little well of water. 4, maybe 5 birds came up to it — I was barely a metre away — and drank from it without any regard to my presence.
It was a tiny pocket of happiness and beauty that I submerged myself in until I found the strength in my legs to get back up and carry on.
So that’s the secret, I suppose — nothing groundbreaking. If you’re struggling and you need to see some beauty to remind you of the good, all you have to do is look. I promise you, it’s there.
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