In the summer of 2018, when I was 23 years old, I moved across the globe from Colorado to Taiwan. It was both the best and hardest decision of my life so far—and after living here for almost four years, there are a multitude of things that the experience has taught me.
Gratitude is, I think, one of the most valuable lessons I’ve gleaned from living here. When I decided to write about it, I quickly realized that everything I’ve learned about gratitude couldn’t possibly fit into a single blog article.
So we’ll start here, in Part 1 of who-knows-how-many, to talk about something it’s easy to feel grateful for (and just as easy to overlook): Beauty.
The day I arrived in Taiwan, an administrator from my new job was sent to pick me up at the airport in Kaohsiung. As we drove north toward Tainan (what would become my new home), I was struck even in my jet lag by how green everything was. I had just left Colorado in mid-summer, which is rather brown and dry, and suddenly I was in a land of palm trees and wild growth and mountains that looked like something out of The Jungle Book.
I remember remarking to my new coworker, who was a Taiwan local, about how beautiful Taiwan was. She sort of laughed, thinking I was being sarcastic. And I remember, at the time, looking out the car window and thinking how sad it was that someone could live among all that beauty and not even recognize it.
As I settled in to my new life in Taiwan, I picked up a new hobby: getting lost in Tainan’s many alleyways.
The layout of this city was totally unfamiliar and incredibly confusing to me in the early days (and, let’s face it, in the present moment too). The main roads all twist and turn and change names and intersect and disappear into one another, and between them is a vast unorganized network of makeshift lanes and tiny crooked alleyways.
So it started as a challenge: Can I get myself lost on purpose and find my way home without a map? (Usually, no. Thank God for Google Maps.)
But soon it also became a kind of refuge; in these first months, everything else was such a challenge, after all. I was missing my home and family and, at times, wondering how insane I could have been to move so far away. I was adjusting to a new life and a new career and trying to figure out how to be an adult, while at the same time feeling childishly dependent on everyone else because I couldn’t yet speak the language enough to accomplish even simple tasks.
After work, I could (and sometimes did) choose to sit alone at home and get lost in my self-doubt and lingering depression… Or, I could go out into my new scary city and get myself lost—and I mean really, genuinely, physically lost—on purpose, and on my own terms. And more and more, that’s what I decided to do.
I would come upon an especially crooked lane with an old bicycle rusting in the corner, some wildflowers growing stubbornly through the concrete, and it would feel like I had stumbled upon buried treasure. I would see someone’s laundry hanging from a third-floor window next to a string of lanterns that led to a small temple, and I’d feel like I had unlocked some great hidden secret.
Without really understanding why, my goal in these little expeditions shifted from “Can I find the way back to my comfort zone?” to “How much beauty can I find?”
I was snapping photo after photo, sneaking through hidden stairwells and getting caught in dead-ends and finding beauty everywhere, in everything. When I found the same little alleyway a second time, it was a triumph like I’ve never felt before; when I learned the route to get there, I wanted to show everyone my discovery.
It was Look, I can do this, I can find my way around and it was See? This is an adventure, not a mistake and it was Look at all this hidden beauty you can find around every corner of the world.
It was these little things, these little beauties, that made me fall in love with Taiwan, and that’s what made it all worth it—because when you fall in love, you work through the hard times as well as the good.
This was the first lesson Taiwan taught me about beauty: that you can find it in the smallest places, and that noticing these little beauties will be what saves you from despair.
A year later, I’d learned a little more Chinese, I’d survived my first year of teaching, and it was time to visit home for the first time since I’d left.
When I got to Colorado, driving home from the airport, the first thing I noticed was the sky. It was huge, and a brighter blue than I thought possible, and it took my breath away.
Surely, I thought, this couldn’t be the same sky I grew up under… Did they somehow make it bigger and bluer while I was away?
But then I remembered that other drive from the airport, and how my coworker hadn’t seen the beauty in her own country that I saw the first day I arrived. And it occurred to me that this, perhaps, is just what happens when we see beauty often enough; we don’t really see it anymore at all.
Of course, I knew that Colorado is a beautiful place—I’d told people so, and I’d thought I believed it—but it wasn’t until seeing it again after a year of being away that I really, for the first time in my life, appreciated just how much beauty I’d always been surrounded with.
I went on hikes and marveled at the mountains; I soaked in the views of the foothills along familiar highways; I was in awe of the wildlife surrounding the house I grew up in, and I fell in love again with the place that had always been my home.
This was the second lesson Taiwan taught me about beauty: that being away for awhile makes everything feel new again.
It has now been almost four years since I first landed in Taiwan, and a lot has happened in all that time. I’ve moved to another area of the city, where so much of Taiwan’s beauty can be seen out of my front window. I’ve quit my full-time teaching job, and have starting pursuing work where I can make some beauty of my own. And of course, I met Oscar, who helps remind me every day to have gratitude for our beautiful life here.
But there have been some challenges and uncertainty in our time here, too. When the pandemic hit, we weren’t sure what to do—stay in Taiwan, where it was still safe, or go home to be with our families? It was an impossible decision then, when we still didn’t know what to expect or what would happen.
And it is an impossible decision still, as we’ve watched what has happened to Ukraine and worried about a possible invasion from China. It is easy to look out of our window at all the beauty Taiwan has to offer and feel as though nothing will ever change, that we can stay here forever in our comfortable life by the beach.
But we know it isn’t true. Life moves forward; things are changing always, and for both of us, Taiwan has always been a temporary chapter. Whether we make the decision on our own or the world makes it for us, we know that we will leave this beautiful place eventually.
And in acknowledging this, in just reminding ourselves that we won’t be here forever, it alights in us a kind of determination to appreciate all the beauty in our lives as we’re able to see it now. We have to soak it all in while we can, because we don’t know when it will be gone—and we know we want to look back on this time and feel grateful that we could appreciate what we had while we had it.
This is the third lesson that Taiwan has taught me about beauty: that it can be fleeting, and so we should enjoy it at every opportunity.
Every once in awhile, in a taxi or at a restaurant, a Taiwanese local will ask me why I’ve decided to stay in Taiwan for so long. I have many answers to this question, but one of them is always “because it is beautiful.”
More often than not, this answer is met with some surprise. This always makes me a little sad; I wish that everyone could see Taiwan the way that I see it, with all its little quirks and secrets and most of all, its beauty.
But I know that it’s just human nature not to see everything we have while it’s in front of us. I think that to some degree, we all know this. It’s just a matter of will, of training our minds to recognize the beauty that’s around us and to hold onto it as much as we can.
Thank you, Taiwan, for teaching me to find the beauty in everything.
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