Sometimes beauty comes out of nowhere. Well, it actually doesn’t come out of nowhere. Usually what happens is we’re too busy paying attention to other things (like our own mental chatter and self-afflicted dramas) to notice what’s going on around us. Sometimes the universe has to smack us around a bit, drop a brick on our head to speak, to bring us back to the present. That’s how the rainbow struck me yesterday.

I was working my sportswriting job, covering a minor league baseball game. Showers in the area had threatened the start time, a scenario which was not OK in my books. Lesson No. 1 in sports journalism — games need to end in a timely manner in order to ease the stress of writing and dealing with editors on deadline. Night baseball games add to this stress, especially when anything out of the ordinary happens, like rain or extra innings or the slowest working pitcher in the history of history. But those are things out of my control. And the harder I try to control my experiences, the more chaotic my life feels. 

Then came the rainbow. It started out as just a faint splotch out in left center field. It grew a bit longer but still was faint. Then it became stronger and stretched the length of the sky. I couldn’t stop looking at it in wonder and snapping pictures of it on my cell phone. For the record, I wasn’t changed instantly. I still complained and had writer’s panic as the baseball game went three hours and 19 minutes long. This morning, however, I found myself recalling the rainbow, it’s mix of simplicity and complexity. It’s amazing what shows up when we stop looking and take a moment to just be. Stop trying to shape your world and you may find that everything you needed, including the beautiful and miraculous, was there for you all the time.