“We never noticed the beauty because we were too busy trying to create it” – Unknown

 

I call myself solar-powered. My personality blossoms and my soul glows when I’ve had ample time outside in the sun. Both my personality and soul take a nasty downturn when the skies are gloomy and the days are wet. Fickle? Maybe. A reality? Absolutely.

 

So what is a woman from Northeast Ohio to do when she realizes that her happiness hinges on the amount of sun she gets in a day? She shoves the desk job aside and moves to a place that has 300 days of sunshine to work as a horse wrangler.  You see, I’ve never been one to settle for moderate adjustments in my life. It’s a pretty simple formula- Figure out what I like.  If I don’t like it- remove it. If I like it- chase it.

 

Over the past 3 months, I’ve spent every day under the vast blue skies and warm Colorado sun. Every bright sunny day has brought a smile to my now very tan face. I’m solar powered and boy am I thriving in my self-manifested world! My body and mind have adapted to my new surroundings- my hair is steadily becoming a lighter color as it bleaches from the hours in the sun, my skin is darkening so much that I barely recognize my own hands, and I find that I don’t even check the weather any more knowing that each day will bring me my needed dosage of sun!

 

Question: What could be more beautiful than getting exactly what you want day after day?

 

Answer: Getting what you don’t want.

 

I was scooping horse poop in the baking hot sun last week when I saw out of the corner of my eye something absolutely beautiful: storm clouds. What they were and what they represented were striking. They were unexpected, refreshing, and DIFFERENT! A huge smile crept across my face to welcome the storm and its cool breeze and revitalizing rain drops. Suddenly I’d gladly traded in my beautiful blue sunny skies for the seemingly ominous rain clouds I’d moved all the way across the country to avoid.

 

That’s when it hit me; what I find to be beautiful is not always what I consciously prefer. It’s constantly in flux and directly related to what I I’m exposed to regularly.  Beauty isn’t stable, but rather unique. Beauty isn’t manifested by me, but rather natural and wholesome. I’ve found that to me, beauty is found in contrast. It’s in experiencing something different that refreshes the soul and revitalizes the senses. Beauty is found in being exposed to people, places, or experiences outside of predisposed preferences and self-made categorizations. 

 

Most of us subconsciously seek similarity and congruence in our friends, daily habits, thought processes, and preferences. What I’ve recently realized is that by artificially building our world around us with only what we’ve consciously deem “beautiful” and “perfect” we’ve built a word with universal appeal and conformation. We’ve eliminated the contrasting beautiful bits that refresh and revitalize us! The true beauty is in variation. It’s found in the imperfections of your grandmother’s homemade quilt, the off-color brush stroke in a piece of art, the wrinkles on a wise man’s face, the scar from a childhood fall on your significant other’s knee, and it’s in nature all around us. Beauty is not always sunshine. Beauty is dynamic. Beauty is in variation.