There’s an old adage most people are familiar with which states, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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This can apply to other things as well.\u00a0 I went for a walk this morning–trying still to start a regular exercise program–and admired the beauty of the mountains.\u00a0 I live in Colorado Springs, and they are an amazing sight to see.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I usually do remember to at least glance at our most famous mountain, Pike’s Peak.\u00a0 I wonder, though, how many people do even that?<\/p>\n
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I think everyone will at least occasionally see the beauty of where they are.\u00a0 This includes their significant other, should they have one, although it may not be often enough.\u00a0 It’s easy to take things for granted and get into a pattern of neglect.\u00a0 Such neglect does not mean a lack of appreciation; it means lack of expression<\/em> of appreciation.\u00a0 Expression is important, even when referring to the scenery in one’s life.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I am an optimist.\u00a0 I see beauty in nearly every aspect of life.\u00a0 I am not a fan of big cities, but I recognize the man-made beauty they have.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The streets had to be paved, which meant the materials for the paving had to be mined and mixed.\u00a0 The paving equipment had to be built–more mining and a lot of assembly.\u00a0 Sure, a lot of that assembly is automated today, but the machines making the equipment had to be built.\u00a0 Go back far enough, and you find human hands at work.\u00a0 There will certainly be human supervision along the way and human hands in that final product.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And that’s just to pave the streets!\u00a0 Building the buildings, sewers, electric power infrastructure and the zillion other things which go into building a city have similar human efforts behind them.\u00a0 The final product–which is typically not very “final”–does have an ugly side, but there is very definitely a beauty to it.\u00a0 If I can see it as a visitor, I would hope the residents can see it from time to time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nature, of course, has made her own efforts.\u00a0 They are often more subtle, but definitely there.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So I see the beauty of where I am, and the people around me.\u00a0 I don’t have a significant other, but I do see the beauty of the possibilities in my life.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We can, all of us, know and recognize beauty, and I think we all do, at least a little bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There’s an old adage most people are familiar with which states, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”\u00a0 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=535"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":536,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/535\/revisions\/536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}