What makes a person beautiful

Come on in.  The gorgeous girlfriend made a chicken.  A farm fresh chicken!  Her parents gave it to us over the holidays.  Her parents are very cool.  But that's not what I want to write about.

Today was a strange day for me.  A lot of people around me expressed some serious and mind altering pain to me today.  Seems like everyone is having a bad go at things recently.  It made me think and feel and of course it made me realize something.  The realization is neat too because it happened due to a combination of things, including something I said.  Occasionally I can be profound.

See we started teaching short stories in the class I help out with.  And me and m'boss were laying out what makes a short story something special in literature.  And I said 'It is the one piece of writing that is so close to the reality of our lives.  It offers a brief glimpse, a snapshot, one moment of limited perspective.  It's how we are presented with life and in that way it best represents who we are as people.'

And once everyone around me had expressed their pain to me, it became a little seed that started to grow in my mind.  And I had a talk with said gorgeous and wonderful girlfriend which got me to actually express what my mind was brewing on.

Like my enjoyment of other people's annoying habits, the weird little peccadilloes that might set other people's annoyance factor up, I find it is not the great things people do that I admire.  Because really, every single person I know who has done something great, that skill, that drive came from choice and hard work.  These things are still impressive but it's nothing I find exceptional.  Everyone is capable of it.

No, what makes someone beautiful is the way they handle the pain involved with living.  The difficulties, the trials, the failures.  How someone can still stand, still smile, still love and laugh, enjoy life, even when something is occurring that causes them exceptional pain.  That makes a person beautiful.

In essence, it is our scars, our physical and emotional wounds, that make people beautiful to me.  My lovely love broke her arm as a youth and almost died from it, and now she carries a metal plate and a six inch long and half inch wide scar on her left bicep.  I love to touch it, run my fingers lightly along it.  It's proof she is meant to be where she is.  It is a sign of her own fortitude and beauty that even with something as large and disfiguring as this scar she is still so gorgeous, so attractive, so wonderful.

So to you my beautiful readers I offer this thought to you.  Are you beautiful?  I think that even at our worst, when we've done the most horrific things possible, we are still a reflection of the totality of existence and therefore wonderful to behold and worth all the effort and love that can be used to help heal those wounds.  So that we might recall the scars later as a point of loveliness.