And as I sat on my Tommy Bahamas beach chair I had the most profound thought: Oh what a stupid I am.
You see, in the weeks leading up to our beach vacation, I shed a lot of blood, sweat, and tears worrying about finding the most flattering bathing suit, on how I would manage my beach hair, and whether or not I had time to lose 5-10 pounds. While I don't consider myself a vain person, the truth is I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what I weigh, how I look, or whether or not I am having a good hair day. Then, factor in a BEACH vacation and the preoccupation ratchets up several notches.
Because there is no hiding ANYTHING at the beach.
Exposure, however, provides clarity because there I was, in my bathing suit, feeling stupid because none of that angst ... NONE of it ... mattered. It had all been for naught.
I looked around at the amazing display of the human form around me, at the tanned, ghostly white, freckled, skinny, and fat; there were muscled bodies, flabby ones, and many in-between ones; I saw wrinkles, sagging bellies, frizzy hair, and bald heads; some people wore modest, sensible bathing suits, while others wore hardly anything at all.
The point is, everyone was more than their body! A man with with a massive beer belly was comforting a crying toddler who had been knocked over by a wave; a pregnant woman sat under an umbrella wearing a sunflower hat, her twin daughters wearing matching hats were digging in the sand; a body builder, heavily muscled and deeply tanned, tip-toed on the hot sand with the gracefulness of a ballet dancer; a grandfather wearing socks and open-toed sandals watched his grandchildren playing a competitive game of bocce; a woman in her eighties pumped her arms as she walked past others half her age.
No one was perfect, but they were all beautiful.
But if I could see this beauty in others, why then could I not see it in myself?
I know I am not unique in saying that self-acceptance is a struggle for many women and that it manifests itself in different phases of our lives. When I was younger, a lot of that struggle was about wanting to measure up to the actress on the movie screen, the model in the magazine, or the friend in Bible study who lost ten pounds. Accepting who we are was all tied up with our yearning for a better future self. Then, as the years went by it was shocking to realize that, despite our best efforts, age catches up to us and now the struggle of self-acceptance originates from a deep-seated longing for time to stand still.
We want to be as we were in the past even as we struggle to hold on to who we are in the present.
Nothing can ever be what it was. The earth turns, the sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes, and the waves advance and recede. Life is too short to worry about tomorrow's sun when you are watching it rise today, or about the encroaching darkness when the moon peeks through the treetops, or about a gone wave when another is just arriving.
With these deep, contemplative thoughts I felt my worries and insecurities carry away with the wind and leave behind the realization that ... hey ... I can embrace who I am. Even there, on that beach wearing a bathing suit. Sure, there is room for improvment, and I will continue to strive to be a better me, but that shouldn't have anything to do with accepting (and being happy with) who I am right here and now.
Don't wait to dance until you hear the music of tomorrow when there is an orchestra playing today.
P. S. For other posts on body image, please read ...
1 comment:
Very well said. And something I think most women need to learn...preferably sooner rather than later.
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