Not many days ago, I was sitting in my home office. It was early in the morning, and I remember looking out the window and seeing the sun start to peek over the horizon. The sky was still a solid blanket of gray with a hint of indigo. I turned away for a minute.
When my eyes returned to the window, the drab sky had suddenly exploded with colors. Splashes of oranges and pinks now covered the bottoms of the clouds — clouds that had been indistinguishable just moments before. The sudden and total transformation of the scene was mesmerizing. I tried to soak it in for a minute, still in awe of how quickly this beautiful image had arisen. Eventually, I turned my eyes away.
Then, when I glanced back a moment later, it was all gone. The sky was now a mixture of light blue and yellow, and the splashes of vivid color that had lit up the sky only a moment before had quickly disappeared. In the mornings since, I’ve looked out my window on multiple days to see if the same things would happen again, and it hasn’t. It took the right weather conditions, at the right time, to create the beautiful scene I saw that morning.
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Amazing, memorable, moments come, and then they are gone. That’s the way life is. The question is not, is beauty out there? But rather, will we have eyes to see it? This doesn’t mean we turn a blind eye to all that isn’t right or good or beautiful — these things exist too. But it does mean we choose to pay attention to the good wherever we see it.
But although there is beauty all around us to be experienced, these moments are fleeting. I was reminded of this earlier this week with the birth of our daughter. As I’ve held her over the past few days, I’ve been reminded of how quickly children grow. The way she sleeps, or cries, or looks at this new world she finds herself in, will eventually be a thing of the past — found only in our memories of these days.
If beauty is around us, but the moments themselves are fleeting, what should be our response?
For me, the main challenge has been to learn to pay attention. Whether it be through distraction or preoccupation, it can be easy to live with blinders on to the moments of beauty that are nearby. I won’t see the sunrise if I never open the shades; I’ll miss my children growing up, if my eyes are always fastened to a screen.
Moments of beauty are near. The question is, will we see them? And will we be able to savor them as they are, knowing they’ll be gone before too long?