Today I went to a wedding ceremony at some church with my mother. The bride was the daughter of my mother's acquaintance. I have never seen her before in my life. Nor have I ever seen her parents, or the groom, or the other guests (well of course except my mother's friends). And yet when it's time to thank and say goodbyes with each parents whatsoever, I was struggling to hold back the tears (what even). Anyway, I remember my mother saying that the bride looked very beautiful.
Later, she corrected her previous statement, into 'The bride was really beautiful. Not beautiful as in physically beautiful, but she seemed really nice and pretty and kind and all.'
My mother loves telling stories. She likes giving me 'insights' of the real world, she said. "This is what the real world looks like. Not everything is as beautiful and peaceful as it looks." Of which I (and the majority of young people spending their lives away on the internet) have probably understood since the age 10. This afternoon she told me about another story, of a (supposedly, I wasn't paying too much attention, but she did said affair) married woman having an affair with a married man. "The man was married to a blind woman." This caught my attention.
"Really?" I replied. "Yes," she continued, "blind people are really strange, right, the way they smile and all, it's because they have never seen their faces their whole life, so they don't really know how to smile or properly display their faces."
All I could think about, was how lucky blind people were, because they'll always have the most sincere and beautiful smiles, without needing to change or to adapt into what the world categorizes as beautiful, without having to compare themeselves to other people, without them having to feel insecure everytime they are happy, because their happy faces didn't fit into a ridiculous standard of beauty that the society has. The idea that my mother, and probably the majority of society, thought of a sincere smile, something honest that doesn't fit into their idea of beautiful, strange, is really bizzare to me. As if someone's true expression needed a permission and acknowledgement from other people to be valid.
Human beings are interesting species because there are so many different kinds of workings inside their minds. At one moment I could be saying things like this, but sometimes (most times, probably) I was also on the judging side. Even though since elementary school I have been laughing with my eyes closed because I used to keep them slightly open but a friend told me I looked ugly while squinting. One is never only a victim, one must also be the perpretator. It's like two sides of a same coin.
Why can't humans treat each other like a piece of art? Every single one of us is different and unique in any ways imaginable. It is true. But when everything is art, nothing is art. When everything is beautiful, nothing is. Learning the history of art, the previous eras have always had a standard for beauty; during art deco it was swirly shapes and colorful materials, during brutalism it was exposed and unfinished bare materials with no decorative elements whatsoever. But when we have gone through it all, the decorative and the simplistic and the complexity and then the emptiness again, what's left? Contemporary arts? Who gave you the right to say which is art and which isn't? Who gave you the right to judge which is beautiful and which isn't? Why do humans get so weary doing good to others, find it hard to appreciate each and every ray of light, to think of each other as important as themselves? Will we ever create a world, a society, that is truly beautiful and peaceful? Will humanity ever be something that is not frowned upon?
I don't know, and I don't think so.
Well, on the bright side, you can always look at it this way: when nothing is beautiful, everything is.