Feeling Beautiful At Any Age

I’m reading this awesome book right now called Change It Up and I just read something so profound. I immediately grabbed my laptop because I felt you all should hear it too. Aging is not something we get too excited about, right?  I know in the past I’ve spent way too much time worrying about my saggy butt, stretched out tummy, age spots and fine lines. I’m slowly but surely learning what true beauty really means.

   “The way to feel beautiful at any age, with any body, is to shift the focus. We no longer need people to look at us to feel beautiful–we need to look AT PEOPLE. We become the mirror for them. Beauty, real beauty, truly is in the eyes of the beholder and not the “beheld”. The beholder feels beautiful herself because she loves what she beholds.

When our toddlers throw their arms up into the air for us to scoop them up, we feel beautiful. When our husbands run to greet us when he returns home from a long trip, we feel beautiful. When our children get married and tell us they’re expecting their first child, we feel beautiful. None of those feelings requires that we look any certain way for other people to admire. We can be thin or heavy, wrinkled or smooth, tan or pale, weak or strong. We can “let ourselves go” or stay in perfect shape. We can be exactly the way we are right now at this moment… and we can be the way we’ll be in five years and twenty years and beyond. We can age without any concern for stretching our face until it feels smooth. The feeling of beauty requires only that we look at the objects of our love and devotion.
This is finally it–the end of needing to be seen, and the beginning of seeing.”

-Amanda Dickson

Don’t you love that! She just said it so perfectly! I’m beginning to understand this more as time goes on. It’s simply switching our focus and being grateful for each moment we have with the ones we love. I truly feel beautiful when I hold my babies, care for them and love them. It’s really amazing how this works. No more worrying about our aging bodies, and lets focus more on SEEING the beauty in others and loving our skin and bodies just they way they are.