Stop comparing: to your darling starlet, to the cover of your pet magazine, to yourself five years ago.  Cease staring at your coworker’s stomach to discern any trace of a stomach roll beneath her blouse.  Desist browsing weekly magazines with fresh pictures of celebrity cellulite.

External body validation is excessively volatile.  Build a buttress of impervious, internal confidence. Love your body exactly as it is, at this very instant. Cherish the strength of your legs, the curve of your neck, the grace of your fingers, the soft skin on your upper arms. No one else can tamper with your own admiration.

There is no universal ideal.  One set of proportions does not fit all.  One set of proportions will not even fit a single individual for an entire life.

My Husband returned with a noisy sack of ceramic shards, which I  proceeded to wet with pity sogged tears.  What had been my long coveted candlesticks had returned from Thanksgiving dinner as an anthropological remnant.

Bereavement soon gave way to resolve and superglue.  And I painstakingly mended each and every recovered piece properly into place.  Reborn, my candlesticks are more beautiful to me now.  I love their broken lines, the tiny cracks, the uneven outline.  Part of me and my determination is in them.

They aren’t perfect, they are beautiful.

Finding beauty more often does not make it any less valuable.  By applying the label of beauty more liberally our lives only become richer.

Search beauty out and you will appreciate it more.  Don’t settle for the obvious or ostentatious, curate a collection of unconventional beauty: the wood grain of a dumpster grate, the gentle curve of a wilted rose, the repetition of color at the ninety-nine cent store.

Children are much better at this than adults.  Adults have been trained in a strict definition of beauty and fail to see the sparkle in concrete, the wonder in soap wrappers.

By expanding our construct of beauty, we are able to fit ourselves inside of it.