Beauty is Her Name...♥

If you ask people to define beauty, there will be a few responses that are consistent across the board. People will either:
A) Try to come up with some watered-down, deep definition that they think you want to hear
B) Honestly feel that beauty is some combination of inner and outer attractiveness
C) Give specific examples of some person (probably a famous person) that they see as beautiful.
Not too many people will give you the first thing that honestly comes to mind when they think of beauty.
My personal definition of beauty encompasses a lot more than just what’s aesthetically pleasing, or what makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I haven’t narrowed it down to a compact, tidily-wrapped phrase yet, so I’ll just describe it. Beauty is not neatly and perfectly packaged. It is not the box that one group of people with influence tell us we must squeeze into in order to receive their adoring stares and acknowledgements. Beauty is what makes us stop and think, and feel, and appreciate. We see beauty all day everyday but our world is so busy and ever-moving that we rarely stop to take things in. I see beauty in the way a man/woman looks at their mate. Or their child. I see beauty in the palate of colors that make up the view outside my window. I see beauty in the child-like fascination with all the small things that we as adults no longer have time, or desire, to pay any attention to. I see beauty in the man helping an older lady across the street, as if she were his own grandmother. I hear beauty in piano and violin music, and in the instrumental contents of the music we listen to everyday. I see beauty in the human form, and the subtle things such as the strong profile {side view} of the Black man. I see beauty in diversity, and acceptance, and tolerance of those that society has told us are “different” from us…
Where does your perception of beauty come from? Beauty is defined as something that gives us pleasure, either sensory or mentally. I don’t want to see beauty as one concrete thing that a person tells me it is. If beauty is what pleases you, and we’re all pleased by different things, it makes sense for people to have different perceptions of beauty. We’ve all heard the phrase “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. This can be applied to numerous areas of life. Relationships. Art. Food. Morals. How do we recognize the beauty in our external world, though, when we don't even stop to understand the beauty we possess internally? My point is that we all have been so conditioned to accept what media and society tell us is beautiful, that we don’t feel the need to think and look inside ourselves to see what we really perceive as beautiful. Until someone asks us. So I pose the question, what is beauty to you?
x0x0♥