I Love Ugly

I love grey tracksuit pants. I love the rubbish bags you throw away - the glossy black ones with the yellow strings. I love the dents and the rust on your car. I love the red bricks - the same ones they used to build houses over and over across these streets. I love the glass around bus stops, scattered like confetti. I love the couple arguing on my train home. I love the dogs that bark at me when I walk past. I love the $1 coffee I drink when my eyelids blink slow. 

Beauty is in limited supply, but ugly? Ugly is infinite. We'll never run out of it.

You could spend time hating it. Cross your arms. Roll your eyes. You could blame everything on it. You could even change cities, move to a beautiful town, but it won't be long till you find it there too. Ugly is here to stay. Maybe we can choose to love it for what it is. Wrap our arms around the mundane, the ordinary, the unremarkable. Keep it all close to our hearts, because anything beautiful, or funny, or true starts out ugly.

So I started loving ugly on my walk to work. Collecting all the curbside rubbish I passed in my head like a magpie. Bikes from someone's childhood. Mattresses. Televisions from 2007. Lounge suites that had passed their expiry date. The occasional supermarket trolley, running away from it's carpark home. No one loves these things- they're obsolete- but when you collect these everyday symbols- when you choose to love the things what no one loves- it feels like you're building a tiny film set in your brain. A visual language. A point of view.

In my head I imagine giving guided tours of my own personal ugly. Here is the car that nearly ran me over one time last month. Here is the supermarket I go to. Here is the job I work at in the evenings. Here is the mall. Here are the traffic lights I stare at. Here are the cars with baby-faced boy racers at the wheel. Here are the red and blue sirens. At the end: they'll be a gift shop, full of flowers I've picked from other people's gardens, and photos I've taken on my phone of these ugly, ordinary suburbs blown up to A3 size.  

All these sights, the very everyday-ness of it all, used to be a source of disdain, until it wasn't. The more I think about it, the more I believe seeing beauty is a decision, just how seeing ugly is. Everyday you can choose to find either.

Before you say it - I know this isn't a new groundbreaking idea. American Beauty. "Do you ever feel like a plastic bag floating in the wind?" Blah blah blah. However cliche it may be, in the most human way, being optimistic and curious how you see our small, ordinary planet still makes total sense.

It's basic day-to-day creative survival. Finding beauty, humour, truth, where there may not otherwise be any. Today, it very well could be a plastic bag floating in the wind. Tomorrow, you could miss dog poo on the pavement by that much. The next day, the light from the streetlamps could hit the trees on your street in just the right way that it makes your heart grow twice it's size.

Who knows? It's ugly out there- but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful too.