What Is Beauty?

There are always images of beauty beyond our reach. Twiggy, Farrah, and Christie...these were the icons of beauty as I was growing up. I was pretty lucky. As a blond, I was part way there. But at age 13, when I compared my body to Twiggy, I was in for problems. I was short and overweight, and so I began a ‘flirtation’ with dieting. Then Cindy Crawford and the supermodels came along, and my flirtation became a full fledged ‘love affair’ that would last on and off for decades.

Whatever the ‘image du jour’, 99% of us won’t measure up. And just when some of us might think we do, the image changes and we have to start over. We have a media that runs on keeping us striving to achieve goals that keep us consuming.

Everywhere we look: diet pills, this diet, that diet, this exercise video, that exercise machine, “do these killer exercises for 5 minutes a day and have great looking abs like mine”! Yes, we fall for it. Over and over again. Our homes are cluttered with exercise equipment we’ve used a few times, diet books full of eating programs impossible to sustain and diet pills we couldn't continue taking.

Just when we think it can't be any worse--mid-life hits us! Wrinkles and sags appear from nowhere on our faces. Our clothes begin to 'shrink' as diets fail to work. Anti-wrinkle creams join our collection of diet pills when they don't deliver. Then when we see our beauty icons looking stretched and wrinkle-free, plastic surgery looks like the only solution. Where do you start? The eyes, chin, thighs or stomach? But the important question is: where does it all end?

It’s a lot of stress to live in the state of “I am not good enough the way I am". And it leaves us in a constant struggle to improve ourselves. It was hard enough before there was a TV in every room with 100 channels running 24/7. This breeds an entire population struggling to achieve perfection, a perfection that no matter what we do to ourselves, we cannot achieve.

We stay in this cycle because we believe there is something we need to change to be what society tells us is beautiful so we can be loved. All of this because we believe we are not beautiful enough just the way we are. And here we are 10, 20, even 30 years or more later, on the same futile merry-go-round.

But ask yourself this, “Who would I be if I gave up the search?”

Maybe in giving up the search we will start to see what we’ve been overlooking in our desire to look like society’s latest version of perfection. Maybe in giving up the search we can begin to see there is perfection here right now. When we focus on what is right about ourselves, our loved ones and our lives, we free up our time and attention to live life fully. Let now be the time to see your perfection and enjoy what it is to be you!