I’m sitting at Starbucks with a Columbia Biz School professor poring over my many presentations on beauty in our culture. I tend to get into auto-pilot mode when I launch into this stuff since I live it everyday.
But at one point during the discussion he put his hand up and stopped me. He asked me, “So how do you YOU define beauty?” I stopped dead in my tracks. Shit…I never really put my thoughts together on that. Sure, I express how important I think beauty is or I offer others’ interpretations. But I rarely share mine. In fact, my long-time friend, Sarah, used to sent me comments via Facebook begging for my POV.
What’s behind this hesitation? Is it that I don’t want to commit to one interpretation? Or maybe I don’t want my critics to pounce on me for not being politically correct? Or perhaps I don’t want to repeat what everyone else says — even if I believe it — so as not to sound repetitive.
So when he put on the spot, I had to respond. The first words that came to mind (after “uhhhh”) were “energy”, “a sense of life” as well as “angular features.” And then I gave up. I wonder if we define beauty in a self-reflective way. I am very energetic, for example. And at the same time, I wish I was more angular.
So instead of trying to find the best words, I picked my icons of beauty from a list we all recognize: Michelle Pfiffer, Sophia Loren, every frech woman I know, and of course my mom!
What do you make of that? 🙂 Happy Mother’s Day
