Beauty
Happiness is extraordinary thing. It makes people beautiful – nobody can look ugly if he or she is truly happy. Beauty is not in only the shape of your face – it is in your genuine smile, in the sparkle in your eyes. Beauty is there in your openness, in your kindness, in your love and your compassion. It is there in your choice of words and in your action.
Every one of us is beautiful when happy, regardless of the shape and color of our faces and bodies. This is one of the things we miss when looking at our reflections in the mirror. Rarely do we look at ourselves with the same affection with which we look at others, so we almost never see ourselves as we really are. When we look in the mirror, we almost never see the sparkle in our eyes, our genuine smile, or our spontaneity of expression. Yet it is a fact that those subtle expressions of beauty have the most meaning and are responsible for making each of us truly beautiful.
Most of us are accustomed to believe that beauty is only in the shape and size of our faces and bodies. This is a false belief that has been programmed in us by the media, which has largely ignored the deeper and more subtle expressions of beauty. In the media – in music videos and commercials, on huge billboard advertisements and all over the Internet – we see images of picture perfect, digitally corrected faces and bodies, with fake facial expressions, or with altogether expressionless faces, and this has become the ideal of beauty. We have never actually given thought to the fact that we do not see such picture perfect people walking through the streets of our cities. Therefore, most of us are trying to live up to the impossible ideal of beauty, spending more and more time and money on perfecting our appearances, while at the same time experiencing a constant stream of disappointments and frustrations. What in fact happens is that we become less and less beautiful, because the inability to fulfill the ideal keeps us in constant disappointment with ourselves, which prevents those spontaneous subtle expressions of beauty that accompany every genuinely happy person, from shining through our own beings.
