Mirror, Mirror On The Wall.... Who Is The Fairest of Them All.

If Beauty is really an inside job, as the saying goes, then how come so many of us spend so much time and money improving the outside? Is there a contradiction here? Are we all, more or less, hypocrites on this? 

 
Standing in front of a mirror we appear to ourselves as whom exactly? Are we a critical eye informed by popular culture---constantly and sinisterly examining our every nook and cranny for that which is not quite right, which can be improved, which can be cosmetically adjusted?

We change our skin colour at the tanner, whiten our teeth, pluck a few out of place hairs, have our hair coiffed and our nose adjusted, our eyes done and our forehead flattened of all appearance of wrinkles or folds granted us by the gods of time. We fight the battle against imperfection. Yet what is perfection? Who is perfection? And when they are there in the land of perfection as the perfect face and body and hair how can they make it last? Isn't impermanence slowly eating away at every perfectly placed hair? Doesn't wind blow our hair out of place? Don't unexpected tears smear our mascara? Doesn't age bring a little weathering to our face? Doesn't time have our way with us---regardless of whether we want it to or not?

Maybe we win a battle or two and fend of the agents of impermanence, yet do we win the war?

Ultimately, this flesh is a rotting corpse, is a skeleton, is but dust and ash waiting to return to its primordial state as dust and ash. The beautiful and the ugly share the same fate here. None escape it. I don't care if you have the credit limit and rolodex of a Dolly Parton. At some point the jig is up and the charade of maintaining appearances at any and all costs becomes yet another exercise in futility.

This is not to say that one should not bathe. Hygiene is healthy! It need not be vain, though. To spend so much time on our appearance comes at the expense of what. Does the poet never pass into birth? Does the musician not write that significant song because she was in front of the mirror obsessing about something that is maybe not worth obsessing over? Does the artist or genuis flounder because the voice from the depths is sacrificed to the gods of the surface?

My sense is that if true beauty does indeed come from the inside--and we actually believe it--then our time will match what we say our values do. We will give time to our insides. We will set aside moments to listen to our soul and not just to the voice coming back from the mirror as we stand there obsessing over that which is not worth obsessing over.

If beauty comes from the inside then cultivating our insides---our consciousness, our heart, our virtue, our character---is where beauty can be found by each of us. Perhaps we will even walk away from the mirror when we are looking for our own beauty, and instead pick up a pen or a paintbrush, an animal or another person, and then let the beauty that is inside us flow out into the world around us.... making the world a place richer with beauty precisely because we were not looking for it in a reflection, but in an active and ongoing gesture of Grace that is beauties insides flowing outwardly. Then... and only then... we might just discover how beautiful we really are no matter how we look.   :-)