There Is Beauty in Everything
Once upon a time I was a little boy on a road trip across West Texas with my family. We were headed probably to California or Wyoming or New Mexico. We were a traveling family; always off to some cool place. My folks would have made great pioneers; unafraid to pack up the kids (there were six), an erroneous grandparent and the dog and head out west. On this particular leg of the trip, I was sitting in the seat behind my father who was at the wheel of our family’s station wagon. West Texas can be quite desolate. “Pretty” is not a word that you would use to describe it. Vast sections of West Texas are flat offering, over massive stretches of distance, no discernable changes in the landscape. As a child in the back seat of our car, already a day and a half into the journey, West Texas challenged me. 
In that moment, it seemed to be endless and grim. There was nothing to look at, it seemed. Nothing. I was from Houston you see, so I looking for drama. I wanted craggy peaks and cacti the size of skyscrapers, tumbleweeds, ghost towns. Then breaking the silence and the monotony of the landscape, my father spoke five short words; “There is beauty in everything.” It was one of those moments. And though I was one of many in the car that day, his words were intended for my ears I am certain. His words were truth. His words changed my life. A perfectly synchronized moment. Me, lost in the landscape and in my observation of what seemed to be so bleak; my father, in his own moment, the same landscape – a different experience and his wisdom to speak of it. “There is beauty in everything.” His words fell inside of me instantly changing the way I saw and experienced that moment. Transformation in an instant. Any moment can be the moment.
We do not live out our lives in a vacuum. In the arc of each lifetime there is a line between everything; a thread that connects each of the paths we’ve taken, the choices we’ve made, the jobs we’ve had, the friendships won and lost. When you follow this thread back to its source you discover that it connects us to who we are, what we want for ourselves, to what lights us up. Everything expressed within a lifetime is manifested from the individual, the self, the soul. I believe our choices are born from our values; the very things that we desire and live to express. Each choice has at its base a connection to something meaningful to us. The art is to follow the connections, to see the relationships between our choices, to discover what they reflect about us and then to see where they’ve been pointing us.