There’s a Japanese saying that I’m particularly fond of:

世界は美しくなんかない。そしてそれ故に美しい。

“The world is ugly, and that’s why it’s beautiful.”

Ugliness and beauty are two sides of the same coin. They depend on each other to exist. You can’t have beauty without it’s nasty looking cousin. The one defines the other. Beauty and ugliness limit each other, give each other form, shape, and value.

A world without ugliness is a world without beauty. They depend on each other, like Siamese twins. That’s why we have to appreciate filth, despair, horror, and all those dark dirty things that make life seem so unbearable. The bad makes the good possible. What’s Batman without the Joker, Superman without Lex Luthor, or the X-Men without Magneto? Heroes are only possible in a world full of villains, and beauty is only possible in a world full of ugliness.

Happiness is impossible without misery. We can’t experience either one of them in isolation. We can only experience them in relation to each other. The deeper we fall, the higher the emotional heights we’re capable of reaching.

We have an emotional baseline. That baseline is the ground we stand on, the place where spend most of our time. Misery is a pit that we dig into the earth, and happiness is a tower that we build on top of it. The foundation of that tower depends entirely on how deep a pit we dig. The more sadness we’ve encountered in our lives, the more capable we become of appreciating the world.

The greater our tribulations, the greater our rewards — so long as we manage to climb out of our sad little holes and climb up our big happy towers.

Ugliness is beautiful, because the more of it we experience, the more capable we are of appreciating beauty when we come across it. However, that’s only possible if we don’t feel sorry for ourselves. We have to allow ourselves the freedom to appreciate beauty, the freedom to take our minds off the misery and sadness of the world, the freedom to forget the pain and suffering that surrounds us.

We are tiny flecks of dust in a vast and lonely universe. We are insignificant in the face of the world we inhabit, and we simply can’t spend our lives living in the shadow of suffering, because the suffering that exists is great, while we are not.

A willingness to be small is a necessary component of happiness. Only when we relinquish our dominance over the world, only when we submit ourselves to the universe, only when we free ourselves of obligations we have no hope of ever being able to fulfill, of suffering and pain we can never expect to ease, will we have the space necessary to appreciate the beauty that does exist in this world.

Once we learn to ease our eyes away from the horrible, we can begin to truly appreciate the wonderful.