I am obsessed with beauty. I seek it everywhere - in a flower, in a raindrop, in a disfigured smile, in silence, in busy-ness, in almost absolutely everything. I am filled with despair when I feel like my quest for beauty isn't respected. It often isn't, especially nowadays. There is no time to wait for beauty to strike us. Yet isn't beauty characterized by its unwillingness to bloom instantaneously? Isn't beauty essentially beautiful because it manifests completely of its own will? Not enough space for beauty in a world where time is money and money is all we ever aspire for.

I sound utterly disillusioned with the world we live in and the generation I come from. I sound like I'm about to take off on an anti-capitalist rant. In some ways I am. In many ways though, I'm simply attempting to reclaim what is essential to being human, since those are the very aspects that are absolutely beautiful. My life these days is a struggle depicting that reclamation. But when I think back to my teenage days, I recognize that my life has always been that struggle. I have always craved to dwell in a beauty that defies the systematic life we've created for ourselves. From time to time, I've dismissed my quest for this beauty, terming it a fetish, a naive child's romanticism, a teenager's idealism but now, for some reason, I feel like the only way forward is to completely embrace it. My willingness to accept my own search for beauty makes me feel at peace albeit somewhat uncomfortable in the ways of the world. Yet, I realize the absolute worth behind such honest sentimentality when I observe the trajectories of individuals and societies that have dismissed so quickly their own quests for beauty in the human experience.

In a way, the sullenness of the boxing up of the day-to-day makes me believe more firmly in the beauty of the visceral nothingness of moments. It is a feeling I shudder to let go of.