Isn't Everything Amazing?
Today I watched It’s Such a Beautiful Day. It’s a darkly humorous and endearing meditation on the value of living in the present. (If the content of this particular post resonates with you, I expect you would like it.)
This isn’t meant to be a proper review, but I did want to share my favorite quote from the movie:
It’s kind of a really nice day. He decides to walk around the block. On the side of the road he sees a woman’s tennis shoe filled with leaves, and it fills him with inexplicable sadness. He walks down his side street and sees striking colors in the faces of the people around him, details in these beautiful brick walls, and weeds that he must have passed every day but never noticed.
The air smells different, brighter somehow; and the currents under the bridge look strange and vivid; and the sun is warming his face; and the world is clumsy and beautiful and new; and it’s as though he’s been sleepwalking for God knows how long and something has violently shaken him awake.
His bathmats are gorgeous. The grain patterns in his cheap wood cabinets vibrate something deep within him. He’s fascinated by the way his paper-towels drink water. He’s never really appreciated these things. All this detail he’s never noticed. He’s alive.
The stars rattle him to the core. All these lights have traveled for tens of millions of years to reach him at this moment. How, somewhere far away, our own sun looks just like one of these. How many of the stars no longer even exist, but whose ancient light is just reaching him now, an impression from a ghost, an amazing, infinite time machine every night above his head that he’s ignored for most of his life. He wants to stop people in the street and say: “Isn’t this amazing? Isn’t everything amazing?”
In my own life, I definitely have those “Isn’t everything amazing?” moments, where I’m stuck by the sheer beauty of just about everything, but in particular the mundane, everyday things we normally overlook. In those moments, I try to take pictures if I can (i.e. if my camera is able to appropriately capture the beauty). I try to capture that perfect moment in time, that feeling, that beauty, to bottle it up so as to relive some piece of it in the future.
To conclude this post, I’ll leave you with one of those pictures. I hope you enjoy!
