What Beauty Is

On the opposite experience a woman who is attractive gets hit on regularly. And not often by genuinely decent men.

This doesn’t seem like an atrocity. Only it reinforces the reality that there’s a standard notion of what beauty is. And that those of us who don’t fit into this paint-by-numbers definition of beauty are ugly. Not worth asking on a date.

We need to think of what beauty is in terms of the non-physical. I don’t like that our faces and bodies are the first thing others see and form an impression of. Within 7 seconds apparently!

Justice is beauty.

Compassion is beauty.

Self-expression is beauty.

Recovery is beauty.

Identity is beauty.

And so on. If we human beings could just see inside the persona to who each other is in our internal makeup that would be lovely.

There’s minor deviations that can cause us to feel poorly about our bodies too. Irrespective of what others think.

Only this self-perception is often the echo of those outside voices crowning you and me as either beautiful or not beautiful.

I say: Our bodies are maps of where we’ve been in our lives. I have kitchen scars from burning my arms taking dishes out of the oven. Today I can say to myself: I was cooking a delicious meal. So be it having scars.

What I think is beautiful you might not think is beautiful.

Either way seeing this beauty as it appears to us is a way to take joy in life.

A dandelion shooting out of the crack in a concrete sidewalk can be beautiful. A struggle that we’re experiencing or have overcome can be a thing of beauty too.

I’ll end here with this point: We should not judge what each of us finds beautiful. This is the human condition: To enjoy the beauty we see.