The white whale!
When you know someone who lives in Bermuda, you have a great place to go to for a holiday.
Bermuda has more beach than anything else. But these aren’t anything like the beaches I’m used to. The ocean is a sparkling blue, the sand a delicate pink, the shoreline littered with glittering shells….and the bathers! If you can afford a proper holiday in Bermuda (i.e. you aren’t cadging lodgings with an uncle), then you can afford a personal trainer and a house with your own gym. Buff doesn’t begin to describe the bodies on show. Taut muscles, flawless skin, sun-bleached hair…and that’s just the guys!
The grand unveiling
All this makes me feel very self-conscious. I have the unhealthy pallor of a recluse, combined with the musculature of a person who works indoors and tries to avoid heavy lifting. They say you are what you eat and I eat lots of potatoes. Taking my shirt off in the presence of the beach-beautiful crowd is nerve-wracking.
Who cares?
My reluctance to reveal my moobs to the world is incredibly sad, because I have nothing to prove. My other half didn’t promise to love me for the rest of my life based on my looks, so why am I so worried what random strangers think? Why do I care about judgments passed by people who I’m never going to see again?
But that’s exactly the problem. Worries don’t tend to be rational! We want to fit in because we’ve been conditioned to think that those who fit in are winners and those who don’t are losers. It was like that in the playground and it’s like that in life.
Misfits
Take a step back for a second. Pretty much everyone who has gained either fame or notoriety for genuine achievements hasn’t really fitted in. Great humanitarians and homicidal maniacs alike have rarely fitted the straitjacket that society has wanted them to wear. Consider Einstein and Hitler. Neither were lookers. But you know who they are decades after their deaths.
What makes us memorable? When all is said and done, it isn’t what we look like. It’s what we do in life, whether that’s good, like advancing human knowledge, or evil, such as deepening the human ability for barbarity.
So, if it’s what we do that matters and not how we look, pass me the potatoes and lets head to the beach.
Written by Kev Kennedy. Posted on 2nd November.
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