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In my high school, the most beautiful girls belonged to a club called the Kilties. The Kilties wore kilts and white sneakers and stood on the sidelines at football and basketball games waving their green and white pom-poms when the team scored. Our high school had cheerleaders as well, but they jumped up and down and got sweaty. The Kilties kicked their legs Rockette-style for a few minutes at every game, but their real job was to look long, lean, and beautiful. As if beauty could win the game. As if beauty could save the day.
As you might sense, I am the tiniest bit resentful about the Kilties. (OK, I envied and despised them. And as my friend Anne Lamott says, I was certain that God hated them, too.) But I have a confession: Although long, lean body parts are not included in my definition of beauty, I believe that beauty can save the day.
A wise teacher once said that we surrender to power unwillingly; to beauty, willingly. Think about the last time you were stopped in your tracks by beauty — a star-studded sky, a blazing sunset, your child’s gap-toothed grin. Notice how the things we find beautiful have the power to move us beyond our ordinary sense of self. Their loveliness makes the concerns of daily life click into their rightful place; we remember what is important. The fact that our thighs are bigger than we'd like them to be, that our favorite socks were the dog's breakfast, or that we weren't given that promotion — these all become what they truly are: passing concerns.
Beauty relaxes, beauty soothes, beauty comforts.
I'm not talking about the "beauty" that conjures images of movie stars with wide-set eyes, lustrous hair, a mouth as big as a small country. (Not to mention those long, lean bodies.) When that's your definition of beauty, you begin thinking that to be beautiful you have to look like someone else. So you diet, squeeze into clothes that are too small, and feel bad about your imperfections.
Halle Berry, who is considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, once said, "Beauty? Let me tell you something — being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless, and it is always transitory."
When we define beauty by what the culture considers physically attractive and try to fit into that narrow ideal, we not only make ourselves miserable for an elusive goal, but we miss the point. Beauty isn't about someone else's idea or definition of what's beautiful. It's about the palpable feeling of openness and gladness you get when you see something lovely, whether it's a cloudless sky or a surprising act of kindness. Suddenly, everything seems more vivid, radiant, alive. That's real beauty. It's free for the looking and available every second, all around us. But to see it everywhere, we have to be willing to let go of our conviction that beauty exists in certain places and not in others. And we need to be able to appreciate beauty in ourselves.
