Manifesting Beauty Beyond The Years

The word ‘beauty’ comes laden with all kinds of immediate visual and emotional connotations depending upon one’s current filter(s): gender, age, circumstances or stage in life, surroundings, needs, preferences, experiences, aspirations, desires, and even health. As I consider this new series of work, Manifesting Beauty Beyond The Years, I’m considering ALL aspects of both beauty and power. The questions I ask myself are these: what is it that attracts one to a particular person? And, is that person’s power of attraction (whatever it might be) worthy of another’s time and attention? Each of us can fill in the blank regarding what constitutes beauty/attraction. But it’s hard to argue the power of attraction, which leads to attention, which leads to power, which lends value. As young people, for instance, we may have quickly deemed ‘hotness’ as the defining factor of beauty. The physical ‘hotness’ had the power to attract, but not always the power to sustain the attention. Which suggests that beyond our teenaged years, other modes of attraction (which I’m referring to as beauty) should be considered when giving our attention to others. Humans may have evolved in some ways, but this is not one of them.

When questioned, many of you came up with your own beauty ideals (grace, courage, determination, strength, kindness, generosity, experience, wisdom, knowledge, history to name a few). And THIS is what I’m talking about when suggesting the need for recognizing meaningful beauty in older people. Why does that matter? It matters because (as many of you admitted), for most of us the older we live and the less we resemble our youthful facades, the less attention is paid, the less value we command and the less our voice matters. The lesson that society has not yet learned is that only through living do we become aware of all we do NOT know, and it is only by living that we eventually come to know what we DO know.

I’m suggesting that since we as humans are living far longer than our ancestors, we need to evolve by adjusting our narrow definition of beauty to include this segment of older people as necessary and valuable to our overall existence. But to suggest this requires bringing positive attention to this demographic via attraction to their unique aspects of beauty, life, wisdom and all the rest of it. My intent is to visually celebrate this stage in life, using a filter of positivity and grace to show viewers what meaningful beauty looks like.  If life is beauty, and beauty is life, then it stands to reason that there is a correlation between beauty and life lived.