Happiness comes on a wall

To me, it was a special magical poster, imbued with creative healing powers. It pictured two beautiful women; one with short, jet black hair and the other with shoulder length brown hair. The angels were dressed in all white, just as angels should be. They were embracing and kissing each other with a delicate passion like a gardener’s handling of a flower. It was not like those other, skanky posters that you see pasted on guy’s rooms in every college across the country. There was not any particular, flagrant physical nakedness about it. Rather, when you gazed entranced upon it, you were suddenly beset with the high ideal of beauty that the photographer portrayed so elegantly. One look at it made me happy to be alive
It was hung taut on my cement block wall by my second day of college.
By the third day everyone on my hall had seen it, and by the fourth people were referring to the poster as ‘my lesbians.’
But for me, the poster wasn’t about any voyeuristic obsession with lesbians. Instead I just saw the beauty of not only women, but everything in the world. I thought about it a lot the first couple days when I was sitting in my bed, staring up at that poster. And I decided that I would not let one day go by without me appreciating the beauty in that poster. I also hoped that it would lead me to see all the beauty in the world around me. This did work out for the next couple of days. I communed with nature, wandering and pondering around the campus, taking in everything.
Then classes started. And so did the school paper. And ultimate Frisbee almost every night with my friends. And all of the other clubs that a college kid who wants to get involved will inevitably join. Somewhere along that line, I had lost sight of my goal. I could not stop everything for even a few minutes to just appreciate life. I saw this happening everywhere to everyone else, but could not even identify it in myself. The funny thing is that you can keep on living in this state of mind, and never have any problem with it.
I was up late reading one night when I decided to take a little break and put the book down. I glanced at the poster, and a slight glimmer registered in my mind. Wasn’t there something special about this? Something that I was missing? The poster had seemed to lose its value for me. While I was examining the curves and contours of their bodies, it hit me. It hit me hard and it hit me fast. So hard and so fast, that I was out of breath and my heart was pounding in my ears.
I saw the poster exactly as I saw it the very first day I set eyes upon it. Everything came back in a rush. They went from being two girls kissing each other to two heavenly beings in a tender, eternal embrace. It is hard to explain the exact feeling in words. It was a paradigm shift. I saw what was happening to me; I was turning into part of the herd. Following everyone else’s rules, never creating my own. I concluded that I was losing perspective of everything in my life. A bad quiz grade had upset me earlier that morning; I realized how insignificant it was in the totality of my whole being.
When things come to you in a rush like that, you become extremely confused and extremely lucid at the same time. I saw that I was living at a different level than I wanted to in my life. This did provide a sense of assurance and happiness for me – I saw the changes that I wanted. But then you start asking questions about your present condition. Why am I really in this room right now? Am I actually learning anything in college, or I am just wasting four years of my life and thousands of dollars so I can have a diploma on my wall when I graduate?
This is the crucial time to take another look at the picture again. I forgot all of my doubts and saw that in this life, I don’t need to look towards the future or back at the past. The only thing that mattered at that moment was the perfect image of beauty in front of me. If I can learn to be appreciative of life at the present moment, I am sure that all of my doubts about anything will be assuaged. I carry with me a mental picture of that poster, to remind me to always see the presence of life in the whole world. Now I see the idea carried by that poster on every wall, in every cloud, and within every raindrop.