Imperfections Make Us Beautiful

Today I was looking at my girl kitty's paws, and thinking how very very adorable they are.

They're even more adorable because I used to think they were ugly.  Yes, I thought a kitty's paws were ugly.  But that's only because I had another kitty's paws to compare them to.  My boy kitty has cute little soft pink pads on his white paws that are very very cute and perfect.  I had him first and so thought that all paws should look like his.  Therefore, when I saw my girl kitty's white paws had pads that were not perfectly uniform in color but a mixture of a darker pink with black spots, I thought them very ugly.  And could not look at them without disgust at first.

It's funny how our standards change the way we see things.

But as I grew to love my girl kitty, I also grew to love her paws; and to realize that they were not as ugly as I had thought them.  In fact, they were not ugly at all, but the cutest little paws in the world.  They looked like multicolored jelly bellies in fact.  Beautiful little jelly bellies.  And the variation of color made them more beautiful than even my boy kitty's paws, which had been my standard.  I then told this story to my friend, who when I saw her next, exclaimed how cute my girl kitty's paws were.

It is all about perception.

My other friend who recently got a puppy noticed that the puppy had an under bite.  It makes him look like he has two large fangs sticking up from the bottom of his mouth, even when he closes his mouth.  She told me this before I met him, and that her sisters made fun of him; but when I saw him, I thought this little feature made this cute puppy even cuter.  It was his signature, and it made him unique.  The same thing goes with my kitty's pink and black paws.

The funny thing about society is that we keep espousing the idea that perfection is beautiful.  That is why all these people keep getting plastic surgery in hopes of looking like some cookie cutter version (Barbie doll) of what society thinks is beautiful.  The thing is, in reality, society doesn't know what is beautiful, or I should say, what can be beautiful.  We base our standard on what we already know and what other people tell us, but nature, nature surprises us.  And we soon find that the thing we thought was too strange and odd to be beautiful, is actually, in its very nature, beautiful, because it is so different and rare, and something we would not have thought of ourselves.

Whenever I see something I deem to be too perfect, it scares me, be it a piece of fruit at the market or a person.  Everything has its flaws -- that is actually what makes it beautiful.  Perfection is not in itself beautiful.  Though we can strive for it and try to attain it, it is not something that can ever be reached; and good thing too, because it is not where true beauty lies.  True beauty is 99%, or less, perfect.  But there is that 1% of imperfection, at least, that makes it whole and beautiful.

It's funny how this society keeps trying to look like the same cookie cutter version of an ideal that doesn't exist, when in fact, our own personal eccentricities are what make us beautiful.  No mountain top is just like every other mountain.  No snowflake is like any other.  No sea shell is like any other.  Man makes things that look alike.  He craves conformity, uniformity.  But nature, very rarely.  Nature likes diversity in beauty.  That's because it is ever evolving, and improving.  And the thing is, man's idea of beauty is ever changing too, based on another man's view, and another man's.  And in reality, society's view of nature is not a general consensus, but the will of the strongest person's opinion holding rank over everyone else's view.

In my view, nature gives some sort of beauty to everyone and everything.  But it is our job to find that beauty in ourselves, and not to diminish it by making ourselves generic copies of each other.  There is no perfect beauty (that might even be an oxymoron), but there is an individual's true beauty.  And that, you will come to find, is even more appreciated in the world.