Weekly Plunder: Week 15 - Buy Buy Buy

Saturday morning. Christmas arrives in seven days. Millions scramble to buy, wrap, and prep the belly for gluttony. In one week, millions of pounds of torn wrapping paper will be disposed of for the sake presents that most didn’t need or want in the first place.

I read that once upon a time, the holiday was celebrated primarily outside, and that the holiday tradition focused on helping the poor. Celebrators spent much of the day on the urban streets, selflessly helping the starving, the diseased, and the mentally ill.

The modern holiday was invented in New York City. The NYC aristocrats of the day didn’t like this ritual of selflessness, likely fearing class warfare and social unrest. In the early 19th century, the New York City elites reinvented the holiday. “Santa” emerged as a core piece to the holiday and “gift giving” was refocused to be more self-serving, focused within the family unit. Therefore, economic growth became intertwined with ritual. The NYC aristocrats, also known as the “Knickerbockers,” made a new series of traditions. St. Nick emerged.

So, much of this “holiday tradition” that we consider Christmas is relatively new and wholly manufactured.

What I’m watching:

What I’m reading: Books that are controversial and contrarian. Having a different opinion leads to more interesting conversations.

What I’m listening to: “Wish You Were Here”by Pink Floyd. Sometimes a path forward requires looking backward. The lyrics of the song, besides indicating a longing for a lost friend or partner, emphasize the need to embrace struggle. Said Roger Waters: “It's to encourage myself not to accept a lead role in a cage, but to go on demanding of myself that I keep auditioning for the walk-on part in the war, 'cause that's where I want to be. I wanna be in the trenches. I don't want to be at headquarters.” This really resonates with me.

Why? Because comfort kills. Let me struggle as a novice, so long as I keep pedaling forward.

What I’m doing: I’m two sessions into physical therapy. Already I’m noticing more foot mobility, which makes me incredibly happy. I’ve waited so long to run again and it’s finally looking like it’ll be possible one day.

It’s overcast and cold. I’m gearing up for a long bike ride.

Beauty is Natural

Modern industry’s job is often to make you feel inadequate, to make you strive for something that seems out of your grasp, to belittle you, and to push your mouth an inch below sea level. These are the feelings that cause a person to open up a wallet. Products, they tell you, will solve issues of appearance.

You are beautiful just the way you are. In fact, you are more than beautiful. You are a masterpiece of evolution, a modern miracle. Your cells are among the fiercest survivors for having made it out of the womb. Your DNA is the product of hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation and survival. Your ancestors were a combination of the fastest, strongest, and smartest humans.

Your ancestors evolved to survive the harshest environmental conditions. In Africa this may have included a brutal sun and the fiercest predators. In the Nordic regions it involved a frostbite-inducing cold and long periods without any sun at all.

You skin is perfect. It has beauty in both form and function. It adapted to allow your ancestors to receive an adequate vitamin D intake regardless of whether you lived under a constant brutal African sun, or a humid and muggy Southeast Asian air, or a Nordic region with longer winter nights than days.

Your hair is perfect. Billboard images are carefully curated to make you feel as though something critical is lacking; your hair must fit the image of someone else’s version of beauty, some sort of “silky and smooth” westernized version. Beauty in a bottle. But anyone who expects something different from what you already are is not your friend.

We are too wonderfully diverse now to live with one version of beauty. Your hair adapted to help you thermoregulate… to retain warmth in the cold and to keep cool in the heat. Human hair beautiful in all of its varieties, from smooth to coarse, from straight to curly to frizzy, regardless of recent societal standards. Your hair exists because at some time, long ago, someone else with similar hair was deemed the perfect specimen. That person thrived while competitors languished.

Your body, too, is perfect. It has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years of withstanding changing climates and wars and various predators that are long since extinct. Attached to you are two incredible feet, each with 26 bones and thousands of neurons that fire with each step, that help you feel the earth. Your feet have something other primate feet don’t: the ability to outrun a deer if necessary. Think about the stamina that requires. It’s built in you; it doesn’t come courtesy of a shoe purchase. Your natural feet kept your lineage alive while other primates died out.

Your face is perfect. It is not too big, too thin, too round, or too long. You speak perfectly, with a perfect mouth and perfect lips. You evolved to perfectly articulate the language of your ancestors and speak precisely, to taste your food, to detect potential poisons, and to find mates.

You are a modern miracle, a self-conscious being, one of the few that is aware of being alive. A shampoo or cosmetic will not augment your true beauty because it’s already there, outside of you and within you, whole as you are right now. Your beauty is tethered to your skeleton.

Your beauty is in your mind as well. You can think, laugh, plan, love, hate, and forgive. You are aware there was a past and that there will be a future. You are aware of your mortality (most likely). No other creature that we know of possesses all of these abilities.

You don’t need better shampoo, or better lotion, or a different skin tone, or a different accent, or a different personality. You are a miracle. Love your reflection: your image is worthy.

You as you is utterly amazing.