This world is a beautiful place and the people in it are infinitely valuable and worth loving as myself.
This is a thesis statement, which means its something around which argument can be generated. It is also (theoretically) testable, as there is evidence for both halves of my little thesis. It's not a great thesis, because I cannot prove that it's certainly, definitively true, but I can argue for it.
Lately, there have been days where this particular thesis statement has sounded ridiculous. How beautiful can a world we so willingly crush be? Isn't what I call "beauty" just my sentimental attachment to the ordinary, to "the way things have been?" Who am I to ask if progress might, on occasion, be ugly and wicked? Do I not already believe that there are many evils on the planet? And people... people are certifiably the most difficult thing about living on this planet. I am a person and I can say that I am a huge pain in my own ass, an unbearable burden on my own heart, what with my bad attitude and marvelous ability to lie about my goodness, and that's without you getting involved. Good Lord, if I could spend an entire day without being inconvenienced, let alone made angry by another human-sized marvel of crazy, I would throw a party and no, no one else is invited. Obviously.
But that's not the whole story, is it? I hope not. It is a cliche and also a fact of life: rainbows, the splitting of light that normally shows us the world now showing us its own marvelous self, really does appear after the weight of water suspended in the sky gets to a breaking point, causing something that does not belong in the air in such a quantity to fall in self-contained units back onto land that almost always seems to need it these days.
And have you considered the marvel of adults? They are children grown taller, disappointed, creatures that in a couple decades have moved from having no neck control to being able to speak in full sentences while sipping coffee, and they do it while driving. People who have found their way through parenthood can resurrect wonder in themselves at the mere sight of a four-legged creature with soft fur. Whole rooms can shake their head at a blunderbuss who thinks that people who live far away aren't worth it--rooms full of strangers who don't want to talk but know that they could and maybe should.
This is a blog post to me: no matter how difficult it is to love, that is not an argument. The necessity or rightness of something isn't determined by its ease. Learning to hold my head the first time was hard. I still fall when walking (less than before) but enough. I may never get really good at this, but I think I'm going to have to keep trying. Today, being frustrated and baffled and grieved isn't enough to make the goodness that I can't avoid (despite my, and my brain chemistry's, attempts) look anything less than beautiful, and the walking contradictions all around me look anything but universes as contradictory and full of marvel as the one I occupy in the darkroom of my skull, still developing into something you can see. Today, loving and seeing beauty won, but it's only 9am, and that means (amongst other things) that I might still get to see the sunset.