Beauty.

There's something so soothing about pain. Maybe it's because without pain we wouldn't know what excitement or love would feel like. Maybe it's because it's the painful and hard times that build us. Or maybe it's because I know that this too will pass.

Either way, I am bigger than this. I am stronger than this. And I am beautiful...in every single way.

Perspective.

When was the last time you looked at the clouds and tried figuring out what they were? I did the other day, and it was amazing. It began with me pointing up and saying the broad, tall cloud was a rooster, and then I thought perhaps it was supposed to be an elephant. And I stared in awe as that elephant trampled across the sky, colliding with the other clouds and transforming into an enormous falcon. That marvelous falcon spread its wings, and in lightning speed it appeared to engulf the entire sky in its wingspan. I gazed as this masterpiece unfolded, seeming to transport myself to an entirely new world.

In a blink of an eye that falcon vanished, and in its place was a massive white hole in the sky, blending in with the rest of the blotches that went on as far as my eyes could see. The thought hadn't crossed my mind that instead of celestial beings dancing in the sky, what I really saw were thousands of droplets of water culminating together in one suspended aggregation. What to my perspective was a wild story unveiling was to another person's perspective mere, forgettable science.

People can look at a cloud and see a rooster, an elephant or the simple process of water vapor congregating in the sky. But it's those differences in perspectives that builds us, helps us, unites us...or destroys us.