True beauty is both transformative and unchanging.
Ever since I was a teenager, I wanted to be beautiful.
I told myself that I would be happy if only one person in the entire universe thought me beautiful. I wasn’t asking for the world here.
The world seems more kind to people that are beautiful. You seem to get more love if you’re beautiful. People take care of you and love you forever.
At least that’s what I used to think.
And though my insecurities from my teenage years still linger, I have learned to think about this differently.
The reason we’re so obsessed with outward beauty is because we know it is fleeting — it’s a reminder that life itself is fleeting.
We hold on so tightly because we know it slips through our fingers so fluidly and swiftly. We think the world callous because we feel the layers of our life being ripped away from us like a band-aid.
But if we had to deconstruct our concept of beauty and re-define what is beautiful and vibrant, we would see beauty in far greater and deeper places than a pretty face on a billboard.
Because that only represents one infinitesimal fragment of beauty. That face is but a single pixel on a canvas the size of the universe.
You see how silly it is to fixate on our forever fleeting youth and outward beauty?
We should be worshiping the stars in the goddamn sky far more than we worship movie stars and supermodels.
Outward beauty plays a role in our human lives, for better or worse, but it’s like an iceberg. The bigger picture lies below surface. The deeper message is hidden in every atom, every expression, and every strange feeling you get from being alive.
Yes, our culture can be harsh and beauty expectations can be unforgiving. But the more we disidentify and disengage with it, the less power it will hold over us.
Expand your line of sight to fill the space of the entire canvas. Expand your line of sight to encompass time and space, because there exists a true unchanging beauty.
I learned I was beautiful because I can see things, sense things, and feel things that connect me to the world around me, in a way that is completely unique to me. I can write about these things, and that’s beautiful too.
And you have that power too.
That is beautiful.
Whatever outward beauty we can lay claim to will fade anyway, so I want to practice seeing the unchanging beauty in myself.
The part of me that doesn’t fade, but keeps gets brighter and brighter until it’s time for my flame to burn out when I join the world of non-existence.
Your mind, your body, your feelings — all have changed with time. But something has not changed, and you know that something has not changed. Something feels the same. What is that? — Ken Wilber No Boundary (CW1, pp. 553–555)
You, along with everyone else, also has a unique way in which we connect and interact with the world that is irrevocably beautiful.
The more I let go of my desperation to be beautiful, the more beautiful I become, if only in my own eyes.
If you want to be beautiful, start by finding beauty in everything your eyes see, everything your fingers touch, everything your mind can imagine, and everything your hands can create.
