This World, Is It Dazzling?

“This world, is it dazzling?” -Floruitshow, Yuzhen

Considering that the most abundant element in the Earth’s crust is oxygen, perhaps not literally. But in my eyes, this world is dazzling in a myriad more ways than its elemental makeup - although that, to the right person, could be considered dazzling too. 

This world is dazzling in its ordinary wonders. Dazzling is the serene beauty of sunrises, the tranquil twinkle of the stars, the exuberant liveliness of blooming flowers in summer, and the silently extraordinary miracles that make up our home never cease to astound me. Yes, there is ugliness: I cannot say with even a shred of honesty that I love the mosquitoes and muddy fields of the rural Chinese village my dad calls home, or getting baked alive under an August sun in California, but these imperfections are what make the good things shine brighter. While I cannot recall any positive stories of mosquito assaults, I can say that I appreciated the absence of them with renewed fervor after spending a month in my grandparents’ house, which contained at least one in every room. 

This world is dazzling because of its people. I am not a very people-y person, but the most meaningful parts of my life are my relationships. There are the obvious ones: my family, with whom I’ve lived all my life, ate almost every meal with, screamed and laughed and cried with. As with any family, we have our nuances, and we do not always appear sane in public when we engage in our habitual round of applause before every meal, a ritual that began sometime during the lockdown when I realized how much effort went into preparing each meal, and wanted to say thank-you in a non-cheesy way to my parents for always cooking for us. We may throw words and the occasional object at each other, but at the end of the day, my security in the knowledge that I will always have a home to return to stems from them.

My friends are, in a way, an extension of my family. I care for them, trust them, appreciate and respect them in almost the exact same way as I do my parents and siblings. Despite being half the planet away from my best friend at the time, she was the first person I texted when I, unfortunately, developed my first crush. When I received my score on the SAT, or when I accidentally went on a date-that-wasn’t-really-a-date-because-I-hadn’t-realised-it-was-a-date-until-he-called-it-that,  and each time before and after I experienced something either wonderful or terrible, she was my anchor.

Since making more friends this summer than I ever have throughout middle and high school combined, I have also learned that there is no minimum amount of time to know each other. The laughter I shared with Ecuadorian peers around a Sichuan hotpot none of us had been prepared for was not lessened in any way by the fact that I had known them for a total of about six hours, and the fact that we are now on different continents doesn’t change how interested we still are in each others’ love lives, because our own are too sad to think about. Not only is there beauty in our friendship, but I think there is also something amazing about how easy it was to sit down with people, find that we clicked, and embark on a journey of friendship just like that. 

So if you were to ask me if this world were dazzling, I would unhesitatingly say yes. Not because I am an incurable optimist - in fact, on most matters I swing towards pessimism - but because how could I not, after seeing, hearing, and feeling the world we live in? I know that my life has been privileged compared to many, and that I am likely unqualified to attest to the nature of the world as of yet but in my young and unseasoned eyes, the world is beautiful. It is beautiful because of its scenic mountains and rivers, its ice caps and deserts, its cities and its expanses of endless prairie that seem to extend forever; it is also beautiful in the way it allows us to laugh, to fail, to grow, and to smile tentatively as we rise from our stumbles and walk onwards. It is beautiful and dazzling in every way I can think of, and this beauty is something I hope I can help preserve for generations to come.