Take a look at the above image. Quick, tell me what you see?
I used that image on a post the other day. Somebody wrote somewhere (maybe they tweeted it, maybe they wrote on “my wall”. I don’t know. Somewhere.) – they wrote, “How come you have this half-naked girl on this post. I’m unsubscribing.”
BAM! He totally dissed me. And now I lost him as a reader. Please come back and read me and I’ll make it up to you. I promise. I’ll do anything. And he made it public. He didn’t simply stop reading me. He didn’t email me. He wrote it in some social media forum for everyone to see that he was going to stop reading me.
Why?
And wait a second.
What half naked girl?
I look at this picture and see a woman at the height of physical achievement. Imagine this: bury your hands in the sand (well, first go to an ocean), put your left foot behind your right ear, and get your left leg to shoot out from your right side. Now lift yourself up so only your buried hands are touching the planet Earth. Hold in that position.
Yeah, its easy, right? Like, you and I can do that no problem.
So this guy sees a “half-naked girl” and decides I’m never ever going to be worth reading again. I see a person who can do something physically with her body that I will never ever be able to do no matter how much I try (and after two trips to India, and hundreds of hours of trying to keep pace with Claudia at yoga I can say I’ve tried and will continue to try and I will NEVER be able to do what this woman is doing).
We all wear glasses. The glasses are crystal clear when we are born. A flower is a flower. Food is food. Mommy is mommy. But then people beat us, betray us, love us, make fun of us, steal from us, hurt us, kiss us, punch us, and the glasses get blurry from all the mud slung at us. So we ask, “what’s out there?” And the government tells us, our friends, our colleagues, bosses, etc.
Now we are looking at things with our new glasses. These glasses are clouded with the anger, the fear, and the anxiety from everything that has happened to us. What do you see in the above picture? Do you see someone who can achieve things you want to achieve? Do you see inspiration that you aspire to be? Or are your glasses blurry. Filled with your insecurities. What you see has nothing to do with the image. It has ONLY to do with the prescription on your glasses. And how good you are at keeping those glasses clean.
I will be dead honest. I see a girl who is about 90% naked. I see someone who would probably reject me if I were single (fortunately I’ve met my own yoga goddess). So perhaps this is the only way I could “use” this woman’s body was by picking her for this post. I picked that image, in fact, because of the pageviews I knew it would get me (people click on pretty girls. It’s just a fact. And since I like more people to read my stuff than less, I will include a picture of a pretty girl when I can).
But if I wanted just a pretty girl I could’ve picked any of the 10 billion pretty girl images on the Internet. So I guess I also picked this image because she is doing something amazing. And I would love to do something amazing. In my own insecurity I feel I’ve hardly ever done something amazing in my life.
Sometimes it’s good to be content with what you have, there’s no need for more skills, more amazement: just be happy with right now.
But, I can’t help it. Sometimes I want to be as incredible and as beautiful and as inspirational as this girl. And I’m not. So to take this image and have it lend its superpowers to my post, well, then maybe I can be just a tiny bit amazing. And also maybe I can get you to click and read me.
My glasses are blurry and cloudy. Every day I scrub them, every day I try to clean them of their dirt. But perhaps most important, if I could do anything in life before I die, I hope I can truly be successful – not only in cleaning my glasses but simply taking them off and seeing myself and the world for what they truly are.