My perception of what is beautiful has changed a lot as the environment I live in has changed throughout my life. Growing up in a huge city, the glimpses of nature that I would get from traveling were the most beautiful things I saw. The same architecture that I passed every day, whether new or old, was constantly ignored by me. I yearned for the stars, the moon and things that were too distant for me to reach and existed in the back of my mind like fragments of dreams left over from a long night of sleep. Although the tall buildings blocked my view and the light pollution obscured the stars from my innocent eyes, my imagination and curiosity were not limited by them. I knew there were places totally different from where I lived, where skyscrapers were nowhere to be found and the landscape was full of trees and flowers. I also knew that I needed an escape before both my vision and my mind were blocked by the accumulating smog and pressure in Shanghai.
Photo taken right in front of my elementary school.
Things weren't actually that bad. Nothing would seem so bad after my memories of it had been stretched and diluted with time and new memories. But that's a much later story; there was a certain kind of beauty that probably cannot be appreciated until what has been familiar becomes distant and strange, and I wasn't able to find that beauty until recently. Things were a little bit different from my hometown when I started spending more of my time away at a boarding school in upstate New York. The views that I saw every day seemed different. Yes, a lot of shops and restaurants had been torn down or renovated, and shopping malls and subway stations were built; but more fundamentally, I was different. I started paying attention to the buildings I walked by when I went back on vacations with lenses stained with nostalgia. I became more aware of what had changed and what remained. I was more present, because I was more removed. Distance created beauty for me. I started to find myself longing to go back to the streets I grew up in and the streets intersecting and branching off them to actually know what my city looks like. I wouldn't want to say I grew up in this city if I don't connect with it inside and out by measuring every street with my footsteps and running into beautiful things more often than not.
I took this photo during winter break of 2015. This was a street five minutes away from my house, yet I'd never seen it lit up like this.
I'm not preaching that if you look hard enough, beauty can be found everywhere. There is no beauty if it can be found everywhere. However, when one's perspective and experiences change, one's perception of beauty changes with them. It is an unavoidable process, just like growing up. Everyone regrets and blames themselves for not appreciating and cherishing something before they lost it, but there is really no use for regret in this situation. The process of losing things that are beautiful is fundamental to the concept of beauty. To end this article, I would like to use a quotation from Kindred: "Beauty fades; that's why it is beautiful."
