Seeking

It was one o'clock in the morning.

Yet sunlight was quietly seeping into our room, finding its way through the narrow gap between the curtains. I could have opened them, but that would have awakened my wife. So instead, I slipped quietly behind the curtains.

There it was—the breathtaking beauty of the midnight sun.

We were travelling through the Lofoten Islands, high in the north of Norway, searching for beauty. And beauty, abundantly, we found.

Since then, I have often wondered whether our whole lives are, in one way or another, a journey of seeking.

We seek beauty.
We seek truth.
We seek happiness.

Yet these are not always the things we consciously pursue.

Sometimes we seek wealth, success, admiration, or the comforting feeling of being superior. Often, we do not merely appreciate approval—we begin to crave it.

And when praise does not come our way, we can easily find ourselves searching for something else: the weaknesses in others, their mistakes, their shortcomings, their foolishness.

The remarkable thing is this:

Whatever we seek, we usually find.

If we search for faults, our world soon fills with faults. For a moment, our ego enjoys the feeling of standing a little taller. But superiority is a restless place to live. Once we climb onto that pedestal, we feel compelled to defend it. Peace becomes elusive. Learning becomes difficult. Growth slows. Even beauty becomes harder to see.

But there is another way.

Today, let us choose to seek the beauty, the kindness, and the wisdom in every person we know and in every stranger we meet.

We will not find these qualities in everyone all the time. But if they are what we are looking for, we will discover them far more often than we expect.

And in doing so, we may discover something even more precious.

A heart that seeks beauty becomes more peaceful.
A mind that seeks wisdom continues to grow.
A soul that seeks kindness quietly discovers happiness.

After all, what we seek is often what we find—and what we repeatedly find slowly shapes the person we become.