Yesterday early in the morning, in Mexico City, I walked down Paseo de la Reforma in order to get on the subway at Metro Hidalgo. As I was walking down the sidewalk, a string of people passed me running, the string soon became a group, and then the group became a crowd. It was all women dressed in purple. Then it dawned on to me: I was in the middle of a Women's Day Run.
As I was carrying a heavy backpack it was impossible for me to join the run, so I just walked at a brisk pace along them. There were beautiful women and I felt vaguely guilty about admiring them, my mind was justifying its locus of attention saying things like "the appreciation of beauty is different than the desire to possess beauty", or "it is not the same to admire a natural landscape for its very existence, rather than admire it for the resources you can obtain from it".
I tried to shift my attention to something else. I started looking at their gaits. Some people run more gracefully than others. What is grace in the context of running? It seems to imply an efficient gait, a bouncy stride, a chain of movement that wastes no energy. Then I would look at the owners of these graceful gaits and they would inevitably be beautiful people, some of them different from the ones I was admiring before, when I was only looking at their bodies.
My train of thought was spiritually interrupted when a message tied to the back of one of the runners entered my awareness "we are not only our bodies" it said. Or something along the lines. I felt a need to protest against the message, or to justify my gawking to the universe, stating to myself that our bodies are just as sacred as our minds and our souls, and that I was admiring physical movement at this time because it was what I could observe in the present moment.
Later in the day, back in Puebla, I was walking towards the gym when a black Mustang slowed down next to me in order to pass a hole in the road. I read its rear plate "No subo gordas" (I don't pick up fat girls). I regretted not pulling out my phone fast enough in order to photograph it, but as fate would have it I would find the car again in a small side street. It dawned upon me how the message, my admiration of the body of women, and this car were related.
There is not much I can write that does not sound trite, but I will try anyways: that which is visually appealing contributes to the beauty of the living being or object. That which is functional also does. Complex beings have different facets in which they can be beautiful. The deepest misunderstanding is taking the part for the whole, to confuse physical beauty for spiritual beauty. The True, the Good and the Beautiful but different facets of God.