Day 13 - Body Beautiful

When I was trying to understand the source of the pain in my foot, I did a bit of reading on the structure of the human foot.  I was highly impressed.  What a marvellous feat of engineering! (Yes, I'm talking about the foot.)  Its structure, flexibility, its ability to bear so much weight - it is nothing short of wonderful.   And it got me thinking.  How often do we look at our feet and whine about their ugliness, or about how tanned they are, or how misshapen our toes are or how wide our feet are, and all along, the foot  is an elegant body part that does so much work for us.

But that holds good for everything - we are the result of thousands of parts of our body working well in tandem - our stomach, our heart, our kidneys, lungs,  intestines, little glands that we haven't heard of but are vital to our well-being, our brain (Our brain!  I've been reading VS  Ramachandran's "The Tell-tale Brain" and it makes mysteries and thrillers fade in comparison.)  - so many beautiful parts in  perfect harmony.

This magnificent body of ours, working so hard, and so smoothly, to enable us to - whine about how ugly that very body is!

Ridiculous, or what?

Hair too dry, nose too blunt, eyes too wide, skin too dark, legs too fat, lips too thin, breasts too small, teeth too crooked, tummy too flabby - all we can think of is what's on the outside, and we feel inadequate.   Why?  Because we are aiming for a standard of beauty that is never within reach.  Never within anybody's reach.   Movie stars, who are supposedly supremely beautiful, go in for nose jobs and chin reconstructions and tummy tucks - what does that show?  Nobody can truly be happy with whatever they look like, if they try to strive for some silly standard of beauty!  Such a waste of time and energy!

But that is not all!  We transfer that feeling of inadequacy to our children too!  Look at this beautiful letter a daughter writes to her mom.  Heartbreaking.  But that story is playing out in millions of homes all over the world even now.  

What do I hear you say?  That even if we don't give our children these wrong ideas of beauty, they will get it from outside anyway?  From peers, and from the media?  Yes, they will.  It is inevitable.  But if you inculcate into them a healthy sense of respect for their bodies,  maybe they will be grounded enough not to be too swayed by those images that the media thrusts at them.  Just maybe. Worth a shot, right?  If we start throwing at them false notions of beauty right from childhood, then the poor things don't have a chance at all. 

Look at this wonderful incident. This is what we should be telling our children. That their bodies are beautiful.

But I know, easier said then done.  I'll finish writing this, get up, catch a look at myself in the mirror and cringe at how frizzy my hair is.  That's called social conditioning.(and the lack of hair conditioning, in this case.)   Who said that frizzy hair is ugly?  Why is it supposed to be ugly?  That's what I am trying to get at.

Trying to look beyond all these notions of beauty is hard, but we can do it.  It is just not worth the agonies that women, and even men, go through every day.  And more importantly, we owe it to our children.  Let them, at least, grow up free from the constricts of these silly notions of beauty!