There’s an old adage most people are familiar with which states, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”  This concept has been the subject of a few songs, in fact, referring to break-ups where the breaker-upper doesn’t realize what a good thing they had in their ex-significant other until after they broke up.

 

This can apply to other things as well.  I went for a walk this morning–trying still to start a regular exercise program–and admired the beauty of the mountains.  I live in Colorado Springs, and they are an amazing sight to see.  I try to appreciate the beauty, but I confess that when I am outside I am mostly focused on getting from point A to point B.  I usually do remember to at least glance at our most famous mountain, Pike’s Peak.  I wonder, though, how many people do even that?

 

I think everyone will at least occasionally see the beauty of where they are.  This includes their significant other, should they have one, although it may not be often enough.  It’s easy to take things for granted and get into a pattern of neglect.  Such neglect does not mean a lack of appreciation; it means lack of expression of appreciation.  Expression is important, even when referring to the scenery in one’s life.

 

I am an optimist.  I see beauty in nearly every aspect of life.  I am not a fan of big cities, but I recognize the man-made beauty they have.  I don’t think such beauty compares to nature’s, but I still think sometimes about the amazing effort which went into creating an urban landscape.  The streets had to be paved, which meant the materials for the paving had to be mined and mixed.  The paving equipment had to be built–more mining and a lot of assembly.  Sure, a lot of that assembly is automated today, but the machines making the equipment had to be built.  Go back far enough, and you find human hands at work.  There will certainly be human supervision along the way and human hands in that final product.

 

And that’s just to pave the streets!  Building the buildings, sewers, electric power infrastructure and the zillion other things which go into building a city have similar human efforts behind them.  The final product–which is typically not very “final”–does have an ugly side, but there is very definitely a beauty to it.  If I can see it as a visitor, I would hope the residents can see it from time to time.

 

Nature, of course, has made her own efforts.  They are often more subtle, but definitely there.  The mountains in my neighborhood didn’t appear overnight; it took hundreds of thousands of years of natural processes–most of it without humans even being around–to form the natural landscape here.  The earliest of homo sapiens, had they come to this region, would have seen pretty much the same thing I do, minus the urban stuff.

 

So I see the beauty of where I am, and the people around me.  I don’t have a significant other, but I do see the beauty of the possibilities in my life.  It may sometimes be true we don’t know what we’ve got until it’s gone, but I don’t think that can ever completely be the case.  We can, all of us, know and recognize beauty, and I think we all do, at least a little bit.