The Rose Standard

I love wildflowers. I love flowers so much, in fact, I had trouble choosing any for my wedding; I wanted them all! It was so hard to choose because each flower had its own particularity, its own beauty. How could I pick one over the other? Of course, roses get a lot of attention, but how can you compare them with an orchid, or a lily, or snapdragon, or iris? They are each beautiful, in very different but still inspiring ways.

I’ve been thinking a lot about fitness and health lately. Especially in preparing for my wedding, there was a certain standard I wanted to attain, physically, to be immortalized in those everlasting photos. The day came and went, happily, yet I still find myself engrossed in the wonderful world of weight loss. I am not trying to lose weight, per se, but simply maintain a healthy lifestyle. It seems that in our culture, the two are inseparable, and so I’ve been given a great deal of food for thought…

There are so many ways of measuring one’s progress on the journey of fitness. You can measure your weight or body fat percentage, calculate your BMI, or even take “progress pictures” of yourself in your bikini and post them on the internet for the world to see. Yet none of these is an accurate measure of either our health or fitness level. Our culture has developed a myopic focus on appearance, far overestimating its worth.  Some reach such a state of dissatisfaction with their appearance that they will cut and sew themselves up to fix their perceived flaws. Can we really look to this as a measure of health?

So much energy and money in our society is put into attaining a “perfect” figure. While this mindset is profitable for the billion dollar industry fueled by our insecurity, I am suggesting that in order to be truly healthy, we need an entirely different paradigm of fitness and health.

What if we were able to change our mindset into one that builds up our confidence, rather than tearing it down at every turn? What if women decided to challenge ourselves in fitness, to build our character by overcoming new obstacles? What if we measured ourselves by the growth of our capabilities, the increase in our discipline, the resilience of our spirits? When we focus so narrowly on our appearance, we miss the true fruits of our labor. Our health and fitness are not just skin deep, and we need a way of thinking that reflects that.

Yet, it does seem that appearance is inextricably linked to fitness. On our quest for a more authentic measure of health and fitness, it would be both impossible and foolish to ignore it. In order to address the current imbalance of importance we place on it, I offer the metaphor of the wildflowers. Imagine a garden in which all flowers are judged on the rose standard. Those flowers that less closely resemble the rose, despite their individuality and unique characteristics, are systematically dyed, disassembled, and pasted back together so that they most closely resemble the rose. Of course, this leaves them wilting and quite unnatural looking. The wildflowers can never truly be considered beautiful because they will never look like a blooming rose.

As ridiculous as the rose standard seems when applied to gardening, it is not so far off from our societal standard of beauty.  When one body type is glorified above all others, we cease to see the beauty of individual women. The very fact that all flowers are not roses enhances their beauty. There is no such thing as a perfect flower. Likewise, there is no such thing as a perfect body. Women have been conditioned to think that there is, and that to fail to attain it somehow makes them less worthy. How sad that we cannot appreciate the beauty in the mirror. So many times, this is the motivation behind fitness, and when women fail to attain that standard, they end up disheartened, disappointed in themselves, or desperate for unhealthy solutions. They end up not really fit or healthy because they were driven by an unhealthy motivation in the first place.

Yet learning to appreciate our real beauty enhances genuine health and fitness in the same way that delighting in each flower helps a gardener cultivate a thriving garden.  There is no perfect shape that the flowers must attain; the garden is beautiful in its very diversity. Some flowers need more fertilizer, water, or sun than others. When a flower begins to wilt, it is a sign that something is wrong. The gardener can attend the needs of that flower individually. Under the right conditions, each flower will bloom, and though different from the last, is something unique, something to be admired, something to be celebrated.  Can we begin to look at ourselves, at one another, in the same way? Can we appreciate the colors and shapes that make us different and all our own? Maybe then, when we find ourselves wilting, we could simply adjust our fertilizer, out of concern for our health and flourishing, rather than a perceived failure to achieve perfection. Maybe then, instead of lamenting our failed efforts to become what we are not, we would focus on pruning ourselves to become the fullest, most beautiful versions of who we already are.