Perceptions

I find beauty in small things. I love how the lace I'm knitting looks over top of my jeans. I enjoy painting my nails in a way that matches or compliments the yarn I'm knitting with. It is simple I know. It makes me smile. Sometimes when I'm knitting I look at my hands quite a bit. It is fun to have complimentary colors there.
 

This week I had the opportunity to talk about beauty and age with a number of clients. Most of them are women and all are from varying walks of life. They are all in varying levels of fitness and from diverse backgrounds It is profound that the women who are most comfortable with themselves are in their early 60s.

Thursday evening we were discussing eyebrows. How funny they are if you just stop and think about them. Yes, they are part of the face...a necessary part of the face even. But if you stop and focus just on the eyebrows you might find yourself giggling like we were. I left this discussion for a short walk home from the gym and encountered another client out for her own walk.

There are so many advantages to having my place of business close to my home. One of them is we attract clients from the neighborhood. I feel like I have a larger base of friends because of this. It is common now for me to be walking around the neighborhood and encounter clients.This woman I bumped into is amazing. She is a 5 time cancer survivor. She is an artist. She sees the world as it is, full of shadow and light. We talked about a drawing she is planning and how the model feels about her nose. It amazed both of us that someone who is confident in life, business, and fitness would feel anything but pride in all aspects of themselves.

Society has us looking at ourselves through so many filters. We question if we are too fat. We worry that we might be too weak. We don't like our straight/curly/long/short/stringy/fluffy/black/brown/blonde/grey hair. We are too tall or too short. The list grows longer and longer. After a short discussion we agreed that as women what we need to be concerned about is living or dead. Those are the factors we need to really look at.

Now I can go on for pages and pages about what is really living. I'll leave that for later posts. Today I'm most concerned that we are happy to be alive. I know I am. I know that there are days I don't appreciate this fully. I intend to start each day appreciating the fact that I am alive. I'll take this on as a small experiment to create more positive self awareness. My goal will be to improve my clients' awareness of themselves in some small way.