Beauty and love are all around us if our eyes and hearts are open to them

By David McElroy · November 5, 2011

It’s easy for me to get depressed about the state of things in this fallen world. Everywhere I look, there’s ugliness, ignorance and hatred. Those things are very real. But if all we see is the squalor in the world, we’re missing the love and beauty that were put all around us to experience. They’re very real, too.

I’ve seen evidence of the very bad and the very good this week, and I’m constantly trying to reconcile the two. It seems that the more you feel one of the extremes, the more you’re capable of experiencing the other extreme.

From talking to others, I suspect that I experience both extremes more strongly than most. The things that hurt me don’t just disappoint. They wound something really deeply, even if it’s something that wouldn’t affect others. I’ve never liked that about myself, but I suspect that if I didn’t feel so deeply about the hurtful things, I wouldn’t feel the beautiful things so strongly.

I started thinking about this Friday night as I drove west on I-20 in Birmingham just barely after sunset. I came over the top of a hill and suddenly had a vast open space ahead of me with hills in the distance. The fading sunset was a pinkish orange hanging just above the black of the hill contours.

It was breathtaking to me. It wasn’t just beautiful. It was something that touched me emotionally. For that moment, all the ugliness of the world was gone. All the problems of daily life were gone. I felt content, at peace and as though I was experiencing something God put in front of me — just for me.

When I feel the other side — the negative side — of this emotional experience, it’s easy to stay there. I’ve been guilty of seeing the negative, getting scared and then not pulling myself out. I’ve lost some things that mattered to me as a result, simply because I experienced the negative side of something too long and couldn’t balance it with the positive that was just as real.

Most normal people’s emotions seem to have a narrower range than mine do. Their highs aren’t nearly as high and their lows aren’t nearly as low. Because of that, it seems as though many people (maybe even most) are oblivious to many things that seem obvious to me. I have no idea why. I just know that I can’t not feel — and I know the feelings aren’t always easy to control.

Honestly, though, I don’t want to change what I feel, because the feelings are who I am. If you took away the intensity of my feelings — of what I experience and what I feel in others — I would be left with a steady but boring and unlivable life. It would be like getting an emotional lobotomy or becoming autistic. I couldn’t understand people. I couldn’t feel life.

All of this brings me to a topic that I find myself constantly revisiting, even though it’s not even close to the political, economic and social ground we normally cover here. The question is where art comes from.

I constantly find myself seeing beautiful things and taking pictures of them, yet having the people with me not even notice the thing that has caught my attention until after I show them. I constantly end up with photos that are lovely, but which are just dim shadows of the beauty I see with my eyes. Yet until I point to it, many people don’t notice. Why?

I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s because I’m an extremist with my emotions. I suspect it’s because I feel something in a sunset or a tree or a cat or even a woman’s face that most normal people don’t feel. And this explains why I’m always so embarrassed when people praise photos I’ve taken. I feel like a fraud, because I know that I didn’t create anything. I simply saw what was already there and pointed the camera and framed the shot in the best way I could. In anything beautiful that I might create — and maybe that anyone creates — I’m not sure that we create beauty. I suspect that we simply notice it — whether with our eyes or with the mind’s eye — and find some artistic medium in which to record it.

There’s always going to be ugliness and hatred around us. We live in a fallen world where those things are rampant. But we don’t have to be discouraged and afraid that the ugliness is what the world is really about. As long as we learn to balance the good and the bad — and as long as we can remain in control of the intensity that threatens to overwhelm some of us — we can focus on good things.

We can choose to see the beauty and feel the love that’s all around us — if our brains and hearts are open to feeling what’s really there.

Note: The pictures with this article are random examples of beauty that I see around me. The top photo is a gorgeous sky that appeared outside of a fast food restaurant where I was eating a few months ago. The leaves are from a tree on my street last week. The picture of the large tree at sunset was taken a few blocks from my house last year. The sunset below was over part of downtown Birmingham last year. All four were taken with my iPhone.

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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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