Last week’s conversation made me contemplate my relationship to aging, hair, skin, grooming, the wellness industry, and beauty in general. My friend Giuliana has helped shape my perspective on vanity and body image, [and change in both.] She turned me onto the late poet, theologian, and philosopher John O’Donohue, who believes we are all hungry for beauty and seek it everywhere.
“No-one would desire not to be beautiful,” he says. “When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming…We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful, it meets the needs of our soul.”
This is from a conversation called The Inner Landscape of Beauty with him and Krista Tippett on the On Being Podcast in 2008, just months before he unexpectedly died.
Our guest last week, Nadine Artemis, is also known for talking about beauty as the founder of the natural beauty products brand Living Libations. She defined beauty in the episode as focus, saying:
“We think we want lives of distraction, but focus is so rewarding. It’s where you’re getting lost, it's like how the French call the orgasm la petite mort (meaning the little death) because you are consumed in a moment. It could be watching a sunset, a hobby or skill you have, anything where you are so focused that you are one with an experience. And focus means you are connected and that is beauty.”
Distraction dulls beauty.
When I've been in the thick of an eating disorder, I become constantly distracted. I put most of my energy toward controlling and managing my food intake and exercise output, leaving little capacity for kindness or care about anyone other than myself. This is subtle because I am high functioning. I show up for parties, participate in food while around people; however this disorder's distraction was there like a computer program running in the background at all times.
It's a diversion from feeling my uncomfortable emotions. But it also distracts and dulls my favorable emotions.
I’m not in the disordered place I was, but I still distract myself from feeling uncomfortable feelings in a million ways…usually it’s been overcommitting and rushing. But lately it’s been these embarrassing, vain, superficial wormholes like:
watching Youtube videos about [very natural looking] hair extensions that cost more than my rent. Or pondering one specific DÔEN dress that, maybe if I wore it and a crush saw me, they'd realize I was the one and it had just been a costuming issue all along!
Nadine says in the episode, "We make decisions because we want to feel good. If we think we want something, it's because we think having it is going to make us feel better.”
I think that on some level, the DÔEN dress or the fake hair will make me feel better. But it won’t make me satisfied… at least not long term. There will be a temporary hit of dopamine that will wear off, until I require another object of desire.
In my episode with Derick Melander, a textile artist whose work explores the intersection between global consumerism and the intimate relationship we have with what we wear, we touched on this consumerist yearning for more, for new, for unique. Even when we are attempting to be minimal and sustainable, we still crave the novelty of an item even if we know the excitement is brief.
None of this is bad, it just is, and having more awareness of it is what I’m aiming for. I live under capitalism and I am a consumer. I buy books, clothes, services. I will continue to desire objects that I think will make me feel better by having them, even temporarily.
And emotionally, I will still need distractions as coping mechanisms. We’re not meant to feel everything fully one hundred percent of the time; we’d combust. Instead we try to feel what we have the capacity to feel. And stay focused for what we have the capacity to focus on, so we can notice as much beauty as we can.
(JOURNALNG)
PROMPTS FOR NOTICING
(BEAUTY)
- What are your primary distractions?
- What are your secondary distractions?
- When and where do you feel the most focus (beauty)?
- When do you feel the most distracted?
- What is something that you can do when you notice you are distracted to shift into focus?
- What do you miss noticing when you are caught in a distraction loop?
Listen to both the episodes I mentioned below.
Have a great rest of your weekend!
Love,
Katie
