Beauty Secret

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.--Confucius

The cleaning lady wheeled the trash receptacle from the girls' bathroom out into the tiled hallway.  When the bell rang, knots of children burst from their classes, formed crooked lines, and awaited their teachers' cues.  She closed her eyes momentarily, feeling like an old oak leaning over a river of humanity as it flowed by her, onward to the cafeteria.

"You look beautiful."

She wasn't quite sure if she had heard it right above the din and all.

The little girl, sensing the lady's confusion, said it again.  "You look beautiful."

She looked down at the little girl, who beamed up at her.  The cleaning lady wore a T-shirt and a pair of faded loose-fitting jeans, her hair squashed in a lemon-yellow bandana, and this morning's rigorous run-through in the bathrooms left a fine sheen of perspiration on her face.  Lord knows she didn't feel beautiful.

What does this little girl see that I don't see?

***

A business-suit-clad mother with two small boys stood in a line that was as long as her day had been at work.  Pushing a loaded cart forward, inch by inch, while her wriggly children tried her patience with the tempting displays of candy and toys, her expression gave way to how much of the day's events weighed down on her.  She felt a thousand years old.

"You look beautiful."

The mother's expression cleared, like sunrays streaming through rain clouds, as she looked down at the little girl whose smile melted the ball of fatigue lodged inside the woman, here in the middle of a crowded grocery store with her pre-K sons pleading for treats by the register.

What does this little girl see that I don't see?

***

"Grandmother, you look beautiful."

Flustered, the elderly woman tried to dismiss the compliment.  "Oh, honey, it's just the makeup.  And I got my hair done yesterday."

"Even if you didn't wear makeup, you still look beautiful inside and out," the little girl said with a stubborn kind of earnestness one could not deny.

***

"You look beautiful."

The little girl repeated her mantra to a cashier on the last phase of her shift.  To a woman whose girth was not well disguised by a flowery one-piece bathing suit.  To the double-amputee in a wheelchair.  To women of all ages.  Sizes.  Colors.  She had embarked on this mission at the age of four, long before Dove kicked off its own worldwide campaign for real beauty. 

She catches them off guard.  Perhaps they're thinking of unpaid bills.  A loved one in the hospital.  What to make for dinner?  Perhaps they're lonely, depressed, unraveling at day's end.  Dreaming of a better paycheck, relationship, future, the world in general.

The reactions vary from waves of pleasant shock to awkward denials.  After all, when was the last time anyone, a stranger no less in the form of a little girl, pointed out something they felt was simply not theirs to claim, a direct contradiction to the sultry models on glossy magazine covers, in racy underwear commercials?

What indeed does this little girl see that they don't see?

So I asked her one day.  "Why do you tell these ladies that they look beautiful?"

She appeared startled, as if I had stumbled over an easy word in a story book. 

"Because they are!"

***

Curled up in bed one evening, I was recuperating from a mind-numbing day at work, my hair a tangled mess, my face scrubbed of makeup, my body swollen from fatigue.  As the ceiling fan whirled overhead, my mind began to shut down.

I didn't hear her come in.  She stroked my shoulder.  My eyelids fluttered open.

"You look beautiful."  This time she signed the words, sweeping her hand over her face.

I gazed at my daughter with her ocean-blue eyes, the layer of freckles across her nose, her braided brown hair, threaded with blonde strands.  Her smile revealed a recent visit from the tooth fairy.  She cradled my cheeks in the palms of her hands, a tender gesture that never fails to touch me.

"Thank you, sweetie," I signed back to her.  "You're beautiful too, Madison.  Inside and out."

She may only be seven years old, but she's stumbled upon the world's oldest beauty secret.  One cannot find it in jars of miracle creams and mud masks, in beauty salons, or in plastic surgery.  For over three years, her blindness to our self-perceived flaws has taught me to seek out the heart as a vessel for all the beauty that it holds.

Mother Teresa once said, "Do not wait for leaders.  Do it alone, person to person."  And so my little girl continues to carry out her own campaign for real beauty...one person at a time.

                      "Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart."--Khalil Gibran