Beauty as a Refusal to Numb Out

Most people don’t notice beauty until it hits them like a firework. A sunset that looks like it’s been Photoshopped. A flower that’s obnoxiously perfect. A moment that practically begs to be posted. But the truth is, beauty isn’t usually loud. It whispers. It nudges. It hangs out on the edges of your vision and waits for you to look up long enough to see it.

And honestly, most of us don’t.
Not because we don’t want to, but because the world trains us to race past everything meaningful. Keep moving. Keep producing. Keep scrolling. Keep numbing. Keep buying. Don’t stop long enough to feel anything real or pay attention to what’s right in front of you.

Choosing beauty in a world like this is rebellion.

It’s a refusal to let distraction run your life. It’s choosing presence in a culture that profits from your absence. It’s saying no to the pressure to be efficient every waking moment and yes to the simple act of seeing. Really seeing.

I’ve learned, over years of painting, that beauty demands a kind of quiet courage. To pause long enough to notice the way shadows shift across a wall. The way color changes as the light moves through the day. The way the Spirit can tug on your heart through something as simple as reflected light on a puddle. My biggest source of creative block is rush-mode, when I’m trying to push full steam ahead. I can’t create unless I slow down and approach things with slow focus and intentionality. Beauty asks you to be awake in a world that rewards being half asleep.

When I paint, I’m not trying to create something decorative. I’m trying to anchor myself back into that awake place. The place where gratitude isn’t shallow positivity but a choice to stay tender. The place where the small, nearly invisible gifts of the day matter as much as the big, cinematic ones. The place where God speaks in subtle impressions and whispers that are easy to miss if you’re in a hurry.

And in a world built on social media and mindless consumption, this choice becomes even more radical. We chase dopamine hits. We chase aesthetics. We chase these perfect, curated moments that never actually reflect the life we’re living. The more we try to force the Instagram moment, the more everything seems to crumble in our hands.

If you have kids, you know exactly what I mean.
It’s family picture season for us. The yearly ritual of “everyone smile and pretend your socks match” for Christmas gifts and holiday cards. And every single time, the more you try to choreograph the perfect scene, the more chaos steps in. Someone blinks. Someone one needs to boss everyone else around. Someone suddenly hates their sibling and ALL of the neurodivergence in my family ramps up to clash in ways that have, at one point, reduced a photographer to tears. And the photo session you thought would be fun ends up a lesson in humiliated defeat.

Which honestly proves the point.

Manufactured beauty collapses under its own pressure.
Real beauty happens in the in-betweens.
In the imperfect.
In the unplanned.
In the human moments you’d miss if you were too focused on controlling the outcome. It’s the photographer catching a candid moment of laughter in between the planned poses that goes on to win them an award.

That’s why choosing to see beauty exactly where it already is feels like rebellion. It’s a refusal to bend to a world that insists everything must be polished, filtered, and optimized. It’s choosing reality over performance. It’s choosing presence over perfection. And it’s choosing to actually live the moment instead of trying to capture it in a way that will impress people who aren’t even in the room.

Beauty pulls me back into the present moment, even when life is chaotic. Even when my brain is doing its own circus routine. Even when everything feels like it’s on fire. It steadies me. It slows me down. It asks me to notice what I’m inclined barrel past.

Beauty wakes you up.
Noticing it is a spiritual practice.
Making it is an act of resistance.
And living in it, even when life is messy and inconvenient, is one of the most liberating choices you can make.

This is the foundation of everything I create. My art is built on the belief that beauty matters, not because it’s pretty but because it wakes people up. It’s a small, stubborn act of resistance against everything that dulls the soul.