interests

It's been almost a year since I started this blog. When I first set up my profile, I saw the 'books' and 'films' etc sections and just knew that I could never make such a decision. 'Interests' is also quite a broad section but I had less difficulty with this one because I angled it towards my interests on this blog. The first two were a bit twatty: love and life, but they are great at simply putting what I am interested in. The third interest is even more twatty, if that's possible, but it's also the most true.

There are plenty of things I am interested in. A lot of them are incredibly mundane (which I admitted in my fourth interest) but around the time I started this blog, I began to realise that the whole time, in some way or another, I spend my life searching for beauty.

I don't know, simply because I do not have mind-reading skills whether everyone else has this same motivation behind much of their actions as me, but I would suspect that quite a few people do. If you think about it, searching for beauty is something you do one way or another most of the time. There are the horrible aspects of it: striving for your own physical perfection, constantly desiring material goods, wishing for a different, more glamorous life.

As you may be able to tell, I thought long and hard about this topic. In some ways, that's what made me start this blog, which I use to document the positive aspects of a search for beauty. I may be writing about my personal life, shopping, films, books or general ramblings but if you look closely, you'll see that somehow it's linked to surrounding myself with beauty. I'm not sure what the hell would happen if this blog didn't have some sort of direction, so I find it helpful to have that object in my mind. Still, the fact that so far I have found it so easy to write over 300 posts about this shows that the search for beauty is infinite and everywhere.

Very nearly one whole year ago I wrote this post. How funny that one year later, every single word of that rings true. Although I didn't articulate it, the writing I put up was a documentation of the realisation about searching for beauty. A couple of months later, I wrote much more obviously about it in this post, where I mentioned that I had started an offline journal entitled 'Beauty'.

Yesterday, I was searching for some note paper to write out some electrical symbols. The first book I grabbed out was a bright orange notebook. On the front cover was written the one word 'Beauty'. On the first, page there was one paragraph explaining the title of the book. The rest of the book is empty.

Recently I have been suffering from a nasty bout of hay fever, through which the great outdoors doesn't seem so beautiful. I am lacking in energy, stressed, anxious, bored, irritable. As I sat down to write a post I thought to myself:

'What is the point? I am not seeing any beauty right now. I shouldn't be writing this blog. Right now, I am in the perfect mood to write that other depressing story which I haven't touched for over a week.'

But, of course, I was just being moody. As soon as I started typing, I remembered the bright pink flower fallen on the concrete pavement which I saw on my way home today, and how much I wished I had a camera to capture that stunning image. Now as I type this, I remember the woman I saw on the tube with her leopard print coat, black trousers with the glittery pink flare and blue eyeshadow resting her arm around the shoulder of her sunglass-clad lover. I remember the sweetness of the librarian who let me take out a book even though another one was hideously overdue. I was wrong. When I am in a mood like this, the worst thing I can do is go and carry on writing that depressing story and my mind knows this and that is why I haven't written any of it for a couple of weeks.

My mind knows that the best thing to do is not allow itself to fall into an energy-less state whenever it can. My mind knows that I should continue in my search for beauty, because when it isn't bad, it's very, very good.