In Search of Beauty in the Least Likely Places
Hot Springs, Arkansas
Beauty makes life valuable. It is one of the features of our lives that appears to provide meaning and purpose... for no other reason than it exists. Perhaps one could argue that beauty is an instrumental good in that it inspires wonder, and wonder is the truly valuable good. Whichever the case might be, I wrote recently that I'm currently focusing my time on pursuits that are inherently valuable and good in and of themselves. In my book, anything connected to beauty qualifies.
Perhaps beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder... it's difficult to say if there are objective standards of beauty. Personally, I discover beauty in all sorts of places: art of all types (especially writing), architecture, the kindness of one human to another... but the place where I find beauty most evident and most obvious is in the natural world.
I'm not alone in this—this appreciation of natural beauty is widespread throughout our species. Exactly why this might be is in itself a curious discussion, relating to fractal patterns and how such patterns are processed in our brain... and why those patterns, when processed, produce such feelings of awe and wonder. That discussion falls outside the scope of this article.
In places like the Alps, the beauty just smacks you in the face! (Chamonix, France)
Instead of spending too much time wondering why, I simply choose to spend my time chasing and searching for beauty. This could be why I graduated from high school and promptly packed my car and headed to Montana for college (actually, for powder skiing). This could be why I moved to Colorado 8 years ago—to have beauty in front of me obviously and overtly, every single day, as the sun shines between the mountain peaks as it rises and sets, over and over again.
Before I left for Montana, I had friends in Wisconsin tell me that after a few weeks of living there, I would stop taking pictures of the mountains and that they'd just become an ordinary backdrop to the rest of life. In not so many words, they were claiming that I would stop appreciating the beauty, that I would stop noticing the beauty in the natural world and would instead be so focused on the world of humans and civilization that I wouldn't notice the mountains.
They were wrong.
When I owned a house, I took pictures of the mountains out my door almost every single day. I took pictures as I went skiing and snowboarding, as I explored on my mountain bike. I would pull over on the side of the road while driving home from the grocery store and snap photos as the sun would break through the clouds in a particularly beautiful pattern.
To me, a life well lived demands being present enough to stop and enjoy the small moments of magic, the small moments of beauty that are present in our everyday lives. But somehow, so many people fail to do just that.
When the Beauty Is Harder to Find
Lindsey Park, Tyler, Texas
I don't live in Colorado anymore... at least, not really. I call it "home" if I have to pick one, but I'm unmoored—a nomad, a wanderer, a vagabond. A short 3-month trip doesn't create this feeling of being disconnected from your home, your grounding location. But I'm now quickly closing on three years of full-time travel, but as the months turn into years, the sense of home diminishes more and more.
As I travel now, I often find myself in places that are not nearly so obviously beautiful as the grandeur of Colorado. To be honest, very few places can match the beauty of the High Rockies. This has been painfully evident over the past couple of months. Christine and I slowly worked our way down through Arkansas, into Lousiana, and across Texas on our way back to Arizona for the winter.
To be brutally honest, a few of the stops on our most recent leg were pretty damn depressing. We saw gray cities filled with trash, run-down buildings, barred-up trailer parks, and homeless camps. The "nice" parts of these cities consisted of strip malls of cookie-cutter buildings serving up rampant consumerism and indulgence. The nice neighborhoods were simply so many more cookie-cutter subdivisions where the personality seemed stripped from the buildings and, by extension, the residents.
In the constant search for beauty, it is places such as these that provide the biggest challenges. When faced with these challenges, it feels like when you discover a small gem of beauty, a diamond in the rough, that the reward might be even greater than appreciating the overt beauty of the mountains.
Hot Springs, Arkansas
Lucky 13 Trail
In Hot Springs, Arkansas, the national forest was filled with trash, the town run down and half-abandoned. The best mountain bike trails began at a wastewater treatment facility. Others circled the county landfill. But a few expertly-built berms and jump lines and small lakes tucked back in the hills provided little gems of beauty.
Shreveport, Lousiana
Riding along the Red River in Shreveport
Walking through Louisiana in late November forces you to embody the feeling of a desolate cold, damp, bog. The town of Shreveport specifically stank. It had its own particular stench, and nobody we talked to knew quite why. Yet even still, lakes tucked back in the forest provided a haven for an unending array of birds and animals, with trees growing straight out of the murky water. Degraded greenway paths ran up and down the banks of the river, providing beautiful vistas even in the heart of the urban degradation. There were still gems to be found.
Tyler, Texas
Tyler Lake
Texas is suburban sprawl made manifest, and the city of Tyler sprawls in all directions for no apparent reason. Traffic, noise, abandoned buildings, massive highways, and strip malls epitomize the region. Even so, we found a gem of beauty in Tyler State Park, with a pristine little lake and a beautiful forest to camp in. Even so, the drone of nearby Interstate 20 provided a constant soundtrack to the natural beauty of the area.
Never Stop Looking for Beauty
In places such as Hot Springs, Shreveport, and Tyler, searching out the pockets of beauty is a challenging endeavor. Yet the beauty is there to be discovered if only we look for it.
It's apparent in the eyes of many of the residents of these cities that they no longer see any beauty. They've stopped searching, they've stopped looking, they've stopped noticing the pockets of beauty. Granted, the beauty is tough to spot. It might even actively be hiding from you. But it's there.
Never stop looking for beauty.
