Beauty in fusion

Beauty in fusion

December 3, 2014

We all seek beauty, breathe it into our souls with ecstasy and revel in its various manifestations. We idealise beauty though it takes for each of us a different, special meaning that more often than not we share little of with others. Yet we all tend to try to blend in when challenged on our thoughts about beauty, about what it is that we relate with as being beautiful, we try to join a common chase for all that is beautiful joined like in a hunt for the rare yet opulent beast.

In our incessant quest for beauty, we have come to ignore the essence of it, occupied as we are with categorising it, restraining it, constraining it to the canons that we know or that we have read of. Somehow, beauty, like all other matters that we dwell upon must, it would seem, fit into yet another box that we can then stow away, content with the notion of having identified and qualified yet another piece of this jigsaw world that bewilders us. Some of us, strong in our sense of what should be beautiful, find the walls of our certainties shaken when we chance upon something that utterly clashes with our notion of beauty but we are still drawn by it, transfixed, mesmerised at the mere viewing of it. It is then, when our hearts and souls are immersed by the sense of that incredibly beautiful “non-beauty”, that we truly come to realize that beauty cannot and may not be categorised, that it may not be forced within the bars of a narrow definition of it, however much the system may wish to influence our view of it.

Beauty for me, is every small thing that touches the heart and soul and that inspires positive emotions. A piece of music, an act, an object of art in whichever form it may be is beautiful when it touches one whether to make one cry, laugh, feel loved or want to bestow love, feel elated, full of hope or even devotion.

When you are open to beauty, you develop a tendency to want to gather around you all things that are beautiful because you want to revel in that beauty constantly, draw upon it as a permanent source of energy. This may clash, however, with the simplicity of life required to continue developing oneself without the external distractions, the most prominent of which are the clutter that can be caused by collecting items, even of great beauty. A good solution to this apparently intricate dilemma is simply having pictures of all that one finds beautiful and to keep these available to one. When one has a vivid imagination, calling upon the memory of viewing something beautiful equates to actually viewing that item again.

The problem with beauty when taken to the level of human beings is that it is often confused with the external appearance of a person and a quote to that effect is that “beauty is skin deep”. While it may remain true that we are often drawn to a person based on the external criteria of beauty we would have assimilated as our own, we seldom keep that initial frame of mind beyond a few months or even a few weeks. For most of us, beyond that external appearance that most of us have been taught to think as beautiful, we need a deeper sense of beauty, something that is beyond the mere skin.

Even when you take people whom one could consider as shallow because they do not go beyond the external appearance of a person, not willing to relate to that person or discover the actual human qualities that the person may or may not have, you realise that their infatuation with the external appearance fades with time. Such people get that epiphany when they realize that they actually know nothing about the person they have chosen based solely upon the external appearance as they have not taken the time to discover the human qualities of the person. More often than not such people realize as time passes that the person they chose for external beauty alone has dedicated more time to enhancing, preserving or restoring that beauty than to developing themselves from a human perspective. When one is really what is considered shallow, one would just carry on, encouraging the person to continue enhancing and preserving that beauty without caring about what goes on within the envelope presented as a delightful package. When one is actually not that shallow, the sense of novelty disappears and is replaced by a longing for something more meaningful.

I have often observed that people with an incredibly beautiful partner from an external beauty standpoint seem to all of a sudden get drawn to people who are referenced as quite plain as compared to their partner. Sometimes, they may even give up their relationship to then live with the other person, leaving their families and friends disconcerted on this sudden turn of events. I believe, this is simply the transformation of the notion of beauty – insofar as it relates to human beings – in the minds of such people. Their personal evolution then causes their view of human beauty to transform, thereby making it difficult to sustain the relationship they had before, especially if their partner did not evolve with them beyond the concept of a still-life beauty. They seem to then seek a person who has little to do with their previous partner at least from an external appearance perspective and also, quite often, from a human qualities standpoint.

Here again, one can say that beauty in a human being is therefore what touches one’s soul, what one relates to and that causes intense emotions. While we are mostly indoctrinated to react and feel positive vibes at the presence of external beauty mainly, when we are in touch with our inner feelings and true to our inner selves, we feel a sense of beauty in a human being when we feel what that person holds of internal beauty. Sometimes it may just be a form of kindness, a sense of humour that we relate to, a formidable capacity to love, empathy, wisdom, openness, simplicity and the list may go on forever as we each relate to different qualities that we find beautiful. We often discover, as we evolve, that the notion of beauty is not just different from one person to another but that it is also different from one age to another and one state of conscience to another within the same person.

Like in the case of objects, one does not need to possess beauty – unlike what some people do by insisting on having a relationship such as a domestic partnership or a marriage – by possessing or attempting to possess the person whose beauty strikes one as worthy of preserving around oneself. Friendship is another form of social interaction which allows one to enjoy the beauty of another human being without the need to “own” that beauty. Photographs too of time spent with that beautiful person can be a good alternative to having that person constantly in one’s life. Again, when one has a vivid imagination, one is able to draw from memories the sense of being in direct interaction with that person whose beauty touched one.

One last thought as I remember the saying « Beauty is in the eye of the beholder »: we need to preserve our individual sense of what is beautiful and avoid the generic input forced upon us by media and society as a whole. Let beauty truly be in our eye, according to what we perceive through our eyes, minds, hearts and souls for we don’t need to be identical to be One.