Staying Beautiful

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October 7, 2018

It seems to me that I've been looking my age more. Tired. A touch more gray. Maybe, occasionally, a little gaunt and grim. I've been feeling it too, and not in the way of wisdom earned or patience learned. Bitter, rather, at unfinished to-do lists, interruptions, things not done right. Snapping at people. "Get off my lawn" stuff.

Recently one day I ran my rounds, waiting for my older kids to be done at practice, while the younger ones scampered on the playground outside. This routine could feel tedious, wasteful even, as I would sit and do little (or nothing) of the work that remained piled up in my mind, while they romped about. Inevitably, though, a seed of rest would be able, briefly, to grow and flower, as I sat.

This day my seven-year-old came up from her playing. This is the girl whose passion is to get married and have children when she grows up. She is the lover of beauty, the one who teases my grays loose and calls them unicorn hairs. The ardent reader who plays house, knows queens, believes in fairies.

She stood next to me and asked me, "Do you know the secret to staying beautiful, even when you get older?" 

As I pondered her question some few seconds, I admit my thoughts went a bit theatrical. Did she see me getting older? Then, did she ever hear of witches who bought their beauty and made others pay their youth for it? Did she remember heroines who proved what true beauty looks like? Did she see villains' true colors revealed in haggard detail?

Did she see me getting older?  

What does she see? 

Maybe she just sees her mother who, she thinks, is beautiful, and she wants me to teach her what that means.

I thought all of this last bit in the flash of a second, then I told her: "Yes. I know the secret." I said, "I don't do it as often as I want to."

"The secret," I told her, "is two things. Kindness." She nodded; she knew already that was true. "And joyfulness." She thought about this, about them both. She nodded again and then drew breath, wrinkling her eyebrows as if to ask, how does that make you beautiful?

I thought of the advice of beautiful women like Audrey Hepburn, who said that happy girls are the prettiest, and that the beauty of a woman is reflected in her soul. I thought of the triumph of good Cinderella. I thought of the saints, always so unexpectedly beautiful, who lived Christ's two great commandments and themselves commanded us to rejoice in Him.

"When," I told her, "you are kind and joyful, there's a light that shines from inside you and makes you beautiful from the inside. But you don't see it with your eyes." 

"How can it make you beautiful if you can't see it?" she asked. 

I thought of the people I have known who are lit from within and said, "Well, you can see it. But this light is not a light like here." I stopped, looking at the space around us. She wasn’t ready for talk of waves and photons and physics. 

But somehow she got it. We were sitting in shade, and she pointed to the clear sunshine outside the tree’s shadow line. "Like that tree over there?" The light coming around the tree was distinguishable to her eyes, she understood. I was speaking of some light she saw from beyond her eyes, with her soul—that part inside her that understood beauty in the first place. 

"Yes," I told her and hugged her. She hugged me back, shaking. She does that, shakes with silent thrills in that old soul of hers. She hugged me long, and then went to run and play with the other children on the playground. 

And I blessed God for such a child, and resolved to do what it took to stay beautiful.