A Different Beautiful by Courtney Westlake

Author:Courtney Westlake [Westlake, Courtney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63409-923-3
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Accepting Beautiful in Your Life

Because of the way it grows quickly, building tightly upon itself, Brenna’s skin is very restrictive, especially if it gets dry. It took nearly a year for her to be able to completely open her fingers, which were formed into clenched fists at birth, fingers encased in what looked like hard plastic caps.

In her early months, if her fingers, toes, or limbs were stretched beyond their limited flexibility, the skin would break open, leaving painful cracks around her joints. It is easy to take for granted how pliable our skin is, stretching flexibly to accommodate all kinds of movement. Brenna’s skin does not stretch like this.

And when your skin doesn’t stretch, you don’t want to move much, affecting your joints and muscles in the process. Movement has come slowly for Brenna, with her first steps shortly after her second birthday and crawling that occurred at twenty-seven months.

Brenna hates to feel off balance and lacks the muscle strength that allows her to catch herself if she falls. Physical contact like bumps and pushes, and especially cuts and scratches, can be hurtful to her body.

So Brenna takes life slowly.

Anyone who takes her hand to cross a parking lot can expect to shuffle slowly along with each of her careful steps. Stepping over a crack or threshold will take several seconds as she musters her courage and balance.

But what this has given Brenna is a true attention to detail. She is not very concerned with what is ahead but more so what the next step will be like. She is paying attention to what is happening right now.

Because she is moving slowly, she sees the bird that lands on the sidewalk, gleefully pausing to call out, “Hi, birdie!” Because she is not running quickly, she notices the truck that just went by, explaining that it looked like “Daddy’s truck.” And in the middle of the rush of school, she slowly takes in the activity, reporting on what color shirts her friends were wearing that day.

We are programmed to look toward the next. But Brenna reminds me about the need to seize our ability to notice the little things as we live each day—grabbing at life’s moments instead of forcing life to grab us in order to get us to slow down because we aren’t paying attention. At least, we’re not paying attention to the now. And the why and the how. We’re too busy living in the “what’s next,” anticipating instead of appreciating.

But there is so much beauty the world has to offer us if we take the opportunity to accept it. It’s not the kind of beauty found in the cover models on magazines or the colorful new kitchen appliances in the Sunday ads but rather the pieces of different beautiful, large and tiny, that have been created for us, outside of our window and within our own hearts. Often we don’t even need to seek out this different beautiful but simply to turn our heads to

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