Beauty in the Unexpected

I just got back from a walk in the rain. It's amazing how much going for a walk is always able to clear my head. Before I go I usually think I'll be bored without music to listen to, but with each step I take it's like the fog in my brain gets cleared away; until I'm left with only the truth - without anything being clouded by doubt, worry or anxiety. Everything seems to be put into perspective.

I realise it is useless to get so depressed about all the atrocities in the world. Overwhelmingly the people you meet are good, and kind, and don't want to hurt others. For all the bad things out there, there are so many good things too, and hopefully more. When you walk, and you take the time to look around you, you see all the things you might have missed if you had just been striding purposefully along without noticing. You see that even in a street filled with tar and concrete and warehouses, there is life pushing up out of the footpath. Even though it's a weed, when the sun emerges from the clouds for a moment, reflecting off the damp concrete and illuminating the leaves, it's just as beautiful as any flower.

Water rushes along the side of the road, washes down driveways, unencumbered. If you close your eyes it could be the background of any meditation music, trickling over pebbles in a stream. You glance between two houses, beyond a cluttered driveway, and are momentarily stopped by the image of deep, dark blue sky, enhanced by the gray and white clouds not quite covering it, over a green hill in the distance.

The rain continues in a sun shower and there is something about the light reflecting off the path you walk on, something about the path ahead being framed by trees, and flowers with their dripping leaves, that you can't even say why it draws you.

A random backyard, otherwise nondescript, features a spooky tree that looks like an extra from a horror movie, one that would seem more at  home next to a mysterious manor, yet is kooky for how out of place it is here.

And on the final stretch, away from any manicured gardens or precisely planned flower beds, is the prettiest shade of magenta that you have to stop, to reach out and touch it.

Maybe these things only hold magic for me but nonetheless I found beauty in the unexpected. And as I enjoyed finding all these things I felt the mental clarity of realising what is important and what is not. If I want to write, I damn well just need to write. It doesn't matter if I can't think of a good plot or I don't know where it's going, as long as I write something. It doesn't matter that I've missed a lot of opportunities in my life, what matters is that I take the ones I have now.