Beautiful
What I consider to be beautiful has changed over time. I’m not sure whether that’s due to the wisdom that comes with age or the age that comes with age.
In my younger years, beautiful was thin but with enough muscle to show strength and tone. It was correctly proportioned eyes, nose and lips set in the right place on the face. It had enough color to look outdoorsy and alive without turning the corner and looking weathered.
Beautiful had good hair of no particular straightness, curl, length or color — just something that went well with the correctly positioned and proportioned face. Teeth were important too, not necessarily perfectly spaced and straight, a slight imperfection adds interest, but in the right shade of white.
I never could live up to that standard and it has stopped being the kind of beauty I try to attain or look for in others.
Saturday mornings I attend a Kundalini Yoga class. The instructor is youngish, blonde and thin but that’s not her attraction. What draws people to her and to her class is her overflowing joy and energy and her funky sense of humor. She’s one of those people who finds herself and life to be amusing. Just being in her presence is to feel the sun shining on your face while you guzzle Red Bull.
It’s much easier to simply buy a new wrinkle cream or another box of hair color. But this inner quality of light is the beautiful I want to behold. And it’s the beauty I wish I could become.
But I wonder if it is any more attainable than my old standard? And if the real beauty that I’m seeing is not actually the glow of her energy but is that she has simply mastered being comfortable in her own skin?
Maybe we all have our own presence that, if fully embraced, can have the same power that I’ve noticed in this and other beautiful women.
Cross-posted on Vision and Verb
I sometimes think that the wisdom comes more with experiences rather than age. I also think that we cannot truly see ourselves as other people see us, or sometimes we ignore things within ourselves, and then they remain hidden. If you were to ask your yoga instructor if she can say the same thing about herself as you see, she may have discovered something that should really be shared on how to obtain the same “glow”. Or is it her “job” to have that persona? Time may also allow us the room in our minds to look at things differently because other focuses have been removed. For example, when the kids are leaving the nest, us Mom’s may start to wonder who we are without kids being the constant focus of our energy. I also believe now that some sense of fear also keeps us from emerging into the person who we would like to be, or we have been comfortable in our role for so long that we do now know what we are capable of achieving. I think the list can get pretty long.