Better Beauty
When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms, the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven, and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.—Akhenaton
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Once upon a time, it was an accepted fact that only a few, the fortunate, the lucky, the pampered, had any hope of being beautiful. Life was hard. Women were married and bearing children by the time they were fourteen, working in fields, toiling over hot wood stoves, and putting up with everything from dysentery to abusive husbands. People aged quickly. Life was short. Beauty was nice if you had it, but most didn’t and they were okay with that. One looked for something deeper in other people. Who was kind? Who was benevolent? Who was skilled? Those issues mattered much more than who was beautiful because with beauty too often came laziness.
Then, in the late 1950s and through the hippy faze of the 60s self-esteem gurus such as Nathaniel Branden started telling us that everyone is beautiful and we bought it. Well, more specifically, your parents and grandparents bought it; we were the product. 1970’s popular song Everything Is Beautiful by Ray Stevens (no relation to Cat Stevens), further sealed the concept in our minds that there is no such thing as ugly or unattractive. The concept was cemented with the movement that insisted everyone get a trophy, that children’s games shouldn’t keep score  so there are no losers, and that everyone who participates is equal.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Bullshit. You know it. I know it. The world knows it. Not everyone is beautiful, just as not everyone can play the piano or pitch a no-hitter for the Yankees. And for Pete’s sake let’s make it good and clear that not everyone is a goddamn model. There are immutable standards for beauty that have stood since the dawn of time and they can be defined mathematically in something called the golden ratio. If you don’t speak math, I’m not going to take the time here to explain it to you. Just know that the ratio has always occurred in nature and once we figured it out some 2400 years ago we started adapting it to everything from architecture to art.
The golden ratio applies to people as well, from our face to our body proportions. Those whose features come most closely to matching those ratios, such as Cindy Crawford, Audry Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe, are those we inherently consider beautiful. This isn’t some 20th-century thing and no, it’s not limited to any one culture. The phenomenon is universal. Society can attempt to re-define beauty by being more inclusive, but that does not deter what nature has decreed. Sure, you can say everyone is beautiful, but not everyone wears it well.[/one_half_last]
Self
The Beauty In Nature (2009)
Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.—Golda Meir
[one_half padding=”4px 0 px 0 4px”]Over the years, I think more has been written about the self than any other topic. Self-worth, self-esteem, self-identity, self-loathing, self-love, and self-help are all topics that have lined bookshelves and stores as long as humans have put ink on parchment. We are very concerned about ourselves and have little difficulty discussing ourselves endlessly, especially now that we have social media so that we can broadcast every ridiculous and trivial detail about ourselves to the entire world. With the advent of  phones with cameras, we’ve even started taking voluminous pictures of ourselves, and call them selfies. We are, and always have been, quite full of ourselves.
What has been born out by countless research, however, is that for all our bravado, we really don’t like ourselves all that much. How one sees one’s self determines to a large degree how one sees others. Where we are unsure of our own qualities we find fault in others in an effort to compensate for and distract from our insecurities. We don’t like our bodies, so we shame the bodies of others. We are embarrassed by our own sexual proclivities, so we express outrage at the sexual identities of others. We feel inadequate in our own understanding of a subject, so we refer to those who are experts on that subject in as unflattering a way as possible.Every negative we see or imagine in ourselves we reflect back in some way negatively on others. [/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]For several years, self-help and self-improvement books and audio tapes have been one of the world’s best-selling genres. We understand that our view of ourselves is inferior and misguided, but we are unsure how to best address the issue. Then, studies have shown, once we purchase the book and begin to see what is required to change, we give up and stop reading. We want to improve ourselves without having to make any significant changes or sacrifice to our current lives. If possible, we would happily take a pill to make it all better, but to have to actually work toward improvement is something very few of us are disciplined enough to actually do.
So, we continue, from one generation to the next, parent to child, handing down the same foibles and shortcomings that have limited us since the dawn of our existence. We fight the same wars, often with the same group of people, we have the same arguments, we battle the same ghosts as everyone who has gone before us. We blame others for refusing to change, to grow, or evolve, not wanting to realize that the problem is more with us than with them.
We talk a lot about improving the world, but we must first start by improving ourselves.[/one_half_last]
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