Sunday, May 06, 2007 T: 16 18

Why do we like a certain brand of clothes, a specific type of food, a certain cuisine, a certain football club? Why do we like a certain actor/actress, a certain genre of movies and music, a certain director? In one way or another, we can each come up with an entire list of reasons to answer questions like these. Yet it’s funny how these answers sometimes seem just to serve to convince ourselves more, not others, others with their own particular sets of likes and dislikes.

Why do like a certain someone? One could tell oneself it’s the looks, the personality, the character, the mannerism and fail totally to convince another. Perhaps there’s a certain innate stubbornness in us, that when we settled on something or someone, there’s not much space for turning back. Those educated in biology may suggest a reason genetic-related, further determined by experience, by environment. In a way, that pretty much not leave any free choice left. I want to believe that we all have though.

I’m proud to be able to say that I listen to a very wide genre of music, from heavy metal to rock to pop to jazz to classical. Maybe that’s because I choose to believe that there’s beauty in everything, just that sometimes we could not see it when others do. There is beauty in a plastic bag just gliding around in the wind, beauty in the structure and anatomy of just a simple leaf, beauty in the muscular movements of a tiger sprinting to catch its prey, something perhaps the director of American Beauty wants to show. And as a Christian, I think it is a challenge for me to see beauty in everyone, to see beyond physical appearances, to be not reduced to mere superficiality, just like music.

I think sometimes there’s just no absolute reason for a way of thinking, a way of looking at things, a like for something or someone. We can name a hundred answers, and may find majority of them does not make sense when we look closer. Maybe that’s what make the world more confusing, but maybe that’s what make life more interesting, when we stop to appreciate the many different perspectives and opinions of the same thing. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a cliché as it is, but it does form some basis of the concept of soul-mates, that there is always a certain someone, and in today’s highly liberal and crazy world, it does have some consoling effect.