Beauty is the art of noticing

I believe this topic is at the core of what moves me, so one blog post is not going to be enough to unravel what BEAUTY is and feels like for me but I want to write something about it today.

In 2019, back when I was living in Sweden, I wrote this on my diary:

26th of August 2019

I just ate a huge plate of tagliatelle with Porcini Mushrooms that I personally harvested.

Ah, such a delight.

Just now, I was reading an article about beauty, and the memory of two nights ago awakened in me. 

On Saturday the 24th of August I went to a friend’s party in Öland. I arrived on the Swedish island around sunset and I walked for half an hour to reach the house. When I arrived the party had already begun and I didn’t know many people so I felt a bit awkward. In the middle of a game a girl named Michelle who was sitting next to me, turned to me and told me I was so beautiful she couldn’t stop to look at me. She was drunk and her energy was joyous and ethereal. At the end of the evening,when she was about to leave she said: “I truly mean it. The fact that you are so beautiful is something that you have to deeply know.”

I said thank you and that I didn’t know what to say but I was pleased by her compliments.

I felt at peace. Maybe I shouldn’t long for words of affirmations of love but I feel that it infused me with joy and a very deep sense of peace because I felt seen.

Why does beauty give me this sense of wholeness?

 

At that time I didn’t explore how transformative that comment felt in my body but I felt that the beauty she saw in me was not shallow. 

From then on I began a journey of making peace with the need of wanting to feel my beauty. 

For a long time I thought that deeply wanting to feel beautiful was frivolous and dumb. I’d let shame take over and not explore what beauty really meant to me. But in the shadow this desire and want still moved me.

It took me years to remove shame from the path I was walking, a cloak too heavy to carry. Shame covered my beauty and my desire to feel and want to be seen in my beauty. The result was a distorted grasp on what beauty meant to me. 

I know that for generations, the wellness industry invested billions in distorting our natural need to feel our beauty, socializing us into believing that we should be within only certain standards otherwise we are not worth to be seen and loved. 

We learnt that the details of our specific flavour of beauty are the very thing we should change, endlessly chasing the unattainable modeled standards. 

With lots of humbling trials and errors I dismantled that stopped me from exploring what beauty felt and meant to me without the obstacles of shoulds and shouldn’ts. I’d ask myself often:

If I like to admire the beauty of an animal or a flower, then why do I feel ashamed of wanting to express and feel my own beauty? 

Not so long ago I found what this definition by Blaise Pascal:

“Beauty is a harmonious relation between something in our nature and the quality of the object that delights us”. I love this quote so much because it’s all about relationships, the waltz between what we feel within in with what there is without. It’s expansive, deeply personal, ever changing. 

Beauty is not a static concept, it’s the dance we engage in when we enter into a relationship with ourselves and the world, when we let ourselves be seen by ourselves and others without an end goal. Beauty is the art of noticing. When you truly look and are present with an object, a person, a creature or a landscape, beauty is there. 

It’s the unique flavour of each element. And so, I believe that giving us the permission to want to look and feel beautiful, is what actually leads us to ourselves. 

There is a mental prompt I use when I’m straying from this path of noticing and feeling beauty, when the cloak of shame and others' opinions brings back the idea that it is a worthless journey. I ask myself “What would someone who feels beautiful do now?” 

This truly shifts my attention towards what truly matters to me, to the unique essence I deeply know is in everything and everyone on this planet.

It’s not about sugar coating the horrors and the misery that is clearly there though. It’s a change of attention towards what brings peace and a feeling of wholemess within so I can be the steward of beauty that I truly want to be.