True beauty is alive

Lately I’ve been noticing how tired so many of us are. Not tired from doing too much, but tired from trying to stay one way.

In nature, nothing blooms all year long. Nothing holds its breath to remain beautiful. Nothing resists its own cycles. And yet we’ve inherited an idea of beauty and perfection that asks us to do exactly that… to stay polished, palatable, unchanged.

When a culture runs on a program that resists cycles, beauty gets frozen, and the life force begins to drain. This isn’t about how we look or the choices we make, it’s about the rhythm we’re striving to live inside of.

Even our desire to grow can get caught in this. Self-improvement often begins with devotion, but becomes distorted when it forgets timing. When it tries to force growth instead of tending the season we’re actually in.

When we try to live out of season, we fall out of flow with the living intelligence of life. And when that happens, meaning begins to thin. The ache isn’t psychological. It’s ecological. It’s what we feel when something living is asked to stay still. I explore this more deeply in a new video I’ve just shared:

New video: The Cost of Perfection (And What We Lost)

It’s a reframe of beauty as something alive, cyclical, and intelligent. And of what becomes possible when we stop trying to be where we are not.