One tenant of Romanticism is individualism. One can embrace individualism by looking inwards for authority and decisiveness rather than relying on the authority of government or religious figures. Another way to embrace individualism lies in recognizing the unique quality of one's own world view. Each of us are the centers of our own realities, and therefore each of our realities is slightly different from the person next to us. While acknowledging our reality as unique seems fairly obvious, staying aware of that fact everyday and every minute is hard. But once accomplished, it can lead to a truly Romantic life.
As a society, we tend to praise those things that are unique because originality implies a particular type of beauty - beauty in knowledge that an object or idea cannot be experienced anywhere else.
If we can internalize that we view everything - literally everything - through a personalized lens, then perhaps it is possible to acknowledge our daily lives as unique and beautiful. Not just vast landscapes and exotic wildlife are beautiful on a hike through the great Midwest, but also the awareness that I'm the only person in the world to see the horizon the exact way I do. In the same way, we all see something that we call the color blue. However, that wavelength looks slightly different to each person, though we may not know it.
To me, practicing Romanticism in our lives means finding beauty in those things that are unconventional. Ordinary things, while not unconventional, are too often overlooked for qualities of beauty. It's time that we gazed a little longer at that chair in Mr. Heidkamp's class, focus a little more on the feeling of the concrete against our shoes, and appreciate the gray windowsills throughout the building. Though these things may not stimulate our senses, they are uniquely seen by all of us. That fact alone, should give them a beauty we don't recognize enough.
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