Finding Beauty in People

Art by Daniel Salmieri from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Have you ever had this feeling — you keep trying and trying in life, and sometimes things just do not work the way you intended? You step back and think “Maybe, maybe I don’t understand the world. There’s stuff that I don’t get. Maybe I am the odd one out here.”

At that point, maybe you consider going back to school.

Maybe you consider buying a book to read about ‘it’, the confusing ‘it’.

Maybe you consider going somewhere else.

What you are looking for, is actually the license to ask questions and seek answers. Knowing this, it becomes easy to find beauty in many people. In the bookstore, a man is seemingly puzzled and overwhelmed with choices right in front of the Philosophy shelves. That’s beauty. He’s seeking an answer in something. That quest is beauty. You don’t have to talk to him to understand, you can understand him by understanding yourself. We are not much different sometimes, we just need to be prepared to accept the commons we share.

So, seeing your friends going back to school after leaving it for a few years. Appreciate the beauty of their decision, rather than judging the value of such decision. The same goes for seeing someone with a huge collection of self-help books, appreciate the awareness of vulnerability and find beauty in that. Seeing someone travels half of the world? It’s not the wealth you should stress your attention over, but that courageous quest to set foot to the unfamiliar. Then, you see the beauty in people easily.

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