Worldwide Ace

People just don’t seem to appreciate true beauty anymore. Perhaps, at 22, I shouldn’t be waxing nostalgic yet, but I know I don’t appreciate beauty nearly enough. I have an affinity for ballet and art museums not for their cultural value — I really could care less about what these things say about the author’s society or the artist’s life — but for their beauty. And yet, I don’t go to museums and looks at the pretty pictures. I sit around and think about going to see these pictures.

So often I see people walking down the street with their head down, eyes averted, too afraid of the social implications of eye contact and panoramic view around them. Sure, it could be the sun shining in their eyes, but it seems more like fear. There’s so much I miss out on when I’m too scared to look. Too much beauty and too many interesting things. I could sit in a classroom and learn the physics of roller coasters, biology and physiology of how a roller coaster affects the human body, the engineering and design to build one, the philosophy and psychology of what riding one is like, but in the end, I still don’t know what riding a roller coaster is like.

That’s the problem with life; we spend far too much trying to learn how to live rather than living.