Someone in my family likes to talk about how the United States is in trouble because of all the shady things that the government does... and the companies.
I'm not so sure. We are still a government by the people. At first glance this sounds absurd – nearly atrocious, perhaps not lacking a firm grounding in reality. This idea is like those fake flowers – beautiful but ultimately pointless. Trouble is, the fake flowers looked real enough to be real. And if I had gone about assuming that every single flower I encountered from then on out was fake, then I would have missed a lot of beauty. This is a trouble with people – it's not so much that we forget to stop and smell the flowers; it's that we assume we already know what every flower smells like.
But life changes everything. No flower can smell the exact same, and you miss out on opportunities by assuming. I've missed out on opportunities by assuming. We miss out on the opportunity to interact with each other when we assume that beauty is fake. Not all of it is. These flowers are living proof of this. Beauty grows out of the dirt; it doesn't live a comfortable life because beauty can't be beauty unless it intimately knows ugly, and fake flowers will never know ugly like fake people will never admit ugly, and it's a tragedy. And I know I'm saying two different things now, but the ugly truth is that we have to fake some beauty until the world can see what we're trying to show it, and we have to be real with our own ugliness or else someone someday may confuse it with beauty. And there's nothing worse than realizing, upon close inspection, that what you thought was real turned out to be nothing but fake.
So here's to being real despite the "ugliness" we think it brings. Everything is a matter of perception, and realizing this is, in itself, an act of great beauty.
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