Beautiful Day

It’s a beautiful day.  No matter where we are or what we’re doing, it’s a beautiful day.  The weather might not be doing what we would prefer it to do–perhaps giving us cold and snow rather than sunshine and warmth–but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.  Things might not be progressing in our lives as we’d like them to, but that doesn’t mean that the world isn’t a beautiful place today.

It’s not fair for us to judge the world based on our own personal state, our own mood.  We do the world a disservice when we don’t see the beauty and the wonder all around us, when we allow the filters of our own perspective to color the world in negative ways.  And we do ourselves a great service when no matter how our lives may be going, or no matter how we may be feeling, we remind ourselves that the world in which we live is still a beautiful, wondrous place.  We can help to raise our spirits and make ourselves feel better when we keep in mind that we have a marvelous gift of a fantastic world all about us.

And yes, there are awful things going on in the world, with people mistreating, abusing, and killing other people all over the place.  But the world itself, this planet and its creatures and the astonishing life we have, still is a beautiful and wondrous place.  There is sadness and there is suffering and there is pain, but in recognizing and accepting that fact, we also have to recognize and accept that there is beauty, there is peace, there is love, there is hope, there is friendship, there is compassion. . . .

If we can remind ourselves every day that we have a great world, that our lives are full of gifts and blessings, then we can give ourselves a gift.  We can brighten our perspective, and we can give ourselves a first line of defense when negative thoughts come calling.  We can give ourselves a refuge from the hurried, harried days we go through as we try to do the best we can in our lives.  And we can help others to recognize the fact that no matter what’s going on today in our lives, it’s still a beautiful day in a beautiful world.  We can do ourselves a great deal of good by focusing on that beauty rather than keeping our attention on whatever may be going wrong.