Learning to See Beauty Again

There are seasons in life when beauty seems to disappear. The mountains are still there. The sunsets haven't changed. Music still plays, people still laugh, and the world continues moving exactly as it did before. But something inside of us has changed. Grief, anger, disappointment, and regret have a way of narrowing our vision until we begin seeing only what hurts. After losing my father and working through some of the complicated emotions that came with that loss, I began to realize something: beauty had never actually left. I had simply stopped noticing it.

My wife and I spend a lot of time on motorcycles, and riding has always made me pay attention to things I might otherwise pass without a second thought. An old barn leaning into a field. A rusted car forgotten behind a fence. A road disappearing between the mountains. Sunlight cutting through the trees at exactly the right angle. My wife has pointed out that I am constantly noticing these things when we ride. Maybe that is one of the gifts of being on a motorcycle—you aren't completely separated from the world around you. You feel the temperature change, smell the rain before it arrives, and notice the landscape instead of simply watching it through a windshield. Somewhere along the way, I realized I needed to start living the rest of my life that way too.

In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho writes, “The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world.” I don't think seeing those marvels requires traveling across a desert searching for treasure. Sometimes it means simply becoming present enough to recognize what is already around us. Pain has an incredible ability to demand our attention, but beauty rarely demands anything. It waits quietly. A song. A conversation. A cool morning. Someone you love sitting beside you. The challenge isn't finding beauty as much as becoming willing to notice it again.

That doesn't mean pretending the painful things didn't happen. Healing isn't replacing every bad memory with a good one, and seeing beauty doesn't require denying ugliness. Both can exist at the same time. One of the ideas I love most from The Alchemist is Coelho's reminder that “when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” Maybe learning to see beauty works similarly. When we intentionally begin looking for something good, our attention slowly starts finding it—in places we might have overlooked before.

I'm beginning to believe that part of life after the fall is not returning to the person who existed before it. Maybe it is learning to experience the world with different eyes. The scars don't disappear. The people we've lost don't return. The things we regret cannot always be undone. But there are still roads I haven't ridden, landscapes I haven't seen, songs I haven't heard, mornings I haven't experienced, and moments with people I love that haven't happened yet. Beauty was never gone. I just had to learn how to see it again.

B. Dozier Singletary