One of our inherent freedoms is to choose where we look. The potential for exquisite loveliness is always present, whether we are wandering in the woods or jammed into a subway car. Beauty often happens to perch itself in the company of what is dreary, or broken. I think it is an act of companionship, born of compassion. 

In church this week the minister invited us to write about a time that was hard. I sat with Ben and he looked at me for guidance. My mind went directly to his admittance to the hospital a year ago, but I did not want to remind him in case he had more current discomforts. 

"What is a time that made you sad?"

He took his small pencil and wrote without hesitation. 

"When I went to Horsham clinic." Even in the naming of a painful place he did not scrimp on seraphs in his script.

So. It still stung. That we had rejected him, or at least his screaming, and banned him to a strange place with stranger people. 

"Now on the other side we write something good. How about that you came home?" I could not bear to linger in his hurt and made a suggestion.

Whether or not it resonated, he wrote that too. I ache to think of the barriers he has around expressing his feelings. Except anger. He has that one down.

We bump up against the people in our life like billiard balls, knocking each other around without so much as a pardon me.  But sometimes it is because we ourselves were banged a moment before, and the momentum has us rolling in a direction we did not even want. 

Still we are, in the end, free to choose. To find what is lovely, even in the mess that is our relationships. Because it is, I truly believe, always there.