Beauty
From the window in my office, I could see a sliver of the sea.
At 4pm, it glistens, a beacon for those who care to look. The sun is directly above it and plays on its surface, and the sun’s clouds appear to be yellow graduating to orange, interspersed with white wisps and marred by the dot of a high-flying bird. I imagine the sky plunging to dark blue, at once, as soon as the sun touches the sea.
There is one space in my eye’s periphery where I refuse to look. It is an abandoned construction, the skeleton of a building, an eye sore, and despite my reluctance to look, I am quite familiar with it. It could have been beautiful, but it is not. Its remains stand tall – the symbol of human-nature-gone-bad. It told of the story of people refusing to agree, of a rift dividing partners, the drying up of money, and the final blow, hurling of lawsuit bayonets. I am sure it caused some pain to someone somewhere, maybe until now.
And it is spoiling the view of everyone who cared to look at it.
I do not know why I thought about coral reefs when I looked at the landscape and the forlorn building. Everything else around it was teeming with life, and there was this dead spot.
I wanted its ugliness to disappear so I imagined it filled with pots and flowers and hanging plants, or plants that would envelop it and plunge it into the wanton state of an urban jungle, dense and beautiful. Like the repopulation and rehabilitation of coral reefs. My mind immediately moved on to other abandoned-building-eye-sores like this one and I imagined them similarly and beautifully altered. There is something about the dank and the unfinished that distresses the psyche.
At once I stopped myself. What am I thinking? It would be too much work, the building could be condemned and it might be too risky for the workers-gardeners-rehabilitators, and it would cost a lot of money. I am sure that with the legal manacles that most probably surround it, I would not be able to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. A garden…. what a crazy thought. A solution devoid of practical application and usefulness. Silly.
And again, I stopped. Ideas start out as silly, sometimes crazy, thoughts. We have been so used to killing our ideas before it even finds a voice, deadening it as we do because we like our comfort zones, and well, there are the old hurts – a yawn, a sneer, a scowl that killed our earlier ideas – that threaten to touch us again.
Hard and impossible and … silly.
No wonder, these days, original thought is hard to come by. How easily are we shaken and awed by the iPhone 5, or the new Angry Birds, or Facebook, during its inception. When all of us have it in us. Inner genius.
(scientists say we use less than 10% of our brains; everyday media does not help, too, doing what it does, teaching us to think and feel the same way)
Here’s a dare – follow your idea. Just follow it, allow it to ferment, mature, take root. Give it free rein.
You just might like where it leads you.
(p.s. If I get to rehabilitate that building, I will let you know :D)
Article by Issa. Photo by Danvic Briones. Copyright 2011.
Website: www.YouWantToBeRich.com
Email: issa@youwanttoberich.com
P.P.S. Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and to all the mothers in the world. To my mommy, I love you. For everything, thank you, thank you, thank you. 🙂
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