Can you be too beautiful? It is hardly problem that most of us have to bother — as much as we might like to dream that it were the case.

Yet the blessings and curses of beauty have been a long-standing interest in psychology. Do those blessed with shiny faces and an attractive body live in a cloud of appreciation — or does it sometimes pay to be ordinary?

At the most basic level, beauty might be thought to carry a kind of halo(光环) around it; we see that someone has one good quality, and by association, our deep mind may assume that they have other good ones too.

Even in the courts, a pleasing appearance can work its magic. Attractive criminals are likely to get less strict sentences, or to escape punishment entirely attractive plaintiffs(原告), meanwhile, are more likely to win their case and get bigger financial settlements. “It’s an effect seen everywhere,” says Walker.

But if beauty pays in most circumstances, there are still situations where it can have opposite results. While attractive men may be considered better leaders, for instance, hidden sexist prejudices(偏见) can work against attractive women, making them less likely to be hired for high-level jobs that require power. And as you might expect, good-looking people of both sexes run into envy — one study found that if you are interviewed by someone of the same sex, they may be less likely to employ you if they judge that you are more attractive than they are.

More worryingly, being beautiful or handsome could harm your medical care. We tend to link good looks to health, meaning that illnesses are often taken less seriously when they affect the good-looking. When treating people for pain, for instance, doctors tend to take less care over the more attractive people.

Ultimately, scientists point out that focusing too much on your appearance can itself be harmful if it creates stress and anxiety — even for those already blessed with good looks. “If you are crazy about attractiveness, it may affect your experience and interactions,” she says. It’s an outdated saying, but no amount of beauty can make up for a bad personality. As the writer Dorothy Parker put it so elegantly: “Beauty is only skin deep. but ugly goes clean to the bone.”

When my sister Mertie told me she had put out tomato plants last summer, I was quite impressed.

Since she was a garden-beginner, Mertie researched exactly how far apart to space her tomato plants; what kind of fertilizer to use; how to keep away the bugs, etc. Once they were planted, she took care of them daily, anxiously awaiting the juicy tomatoes to appear. But, day after day, her plants were tomato-less while all of her neighbors who had also put out tomato plants were already enjoying the fruit of their labor.

Frustrated, Mertie gave in and went to the market to search fresh tomatoes. While paying, Mertie told the farmer her troubles. The farmer paused to think for a moment and then asked, “Well, what kind of tomatoes did you plant?”

“I think they were called Big Boy,” Mertie remembered.

“Well there’s your problem,” the farmer explained. “Big Boy and Better Boy tomatoes have a 95-day growing period whereas regular tomato plants produce fruit in as few as 70 days…you just have to wait a little longer for the Big Boys.”

With that new knowledge, Mertie went home with excitement, knowing they would be worth the wait.

Thinking about my sister’s gardening experience, I had to smile. She just didn’t know that Big Boy tomatoes took longer--neither did I--but once she discovered that information, she was no longer discouraged and upset about the lack of tomatoes on her plants. Instead, she was encouraged and excited to see them a few weeks later.

It makes me wonder how many of us have “Big Boy” dreams in our hearts, yet we just don’t realize that they are of the “Big Boy” variety so we are discouraged and worn out with the waiting process. Instead of waiting with excitement, we give up on our dreams and figure we must have done something wrong to stop them from coming to pass. Frustrated, we see other people’s dreams coming true, and we wonder why ours haven’t yet been achieved.

A flash of light, then an explosion — BAM! I sit upright up out of a sound sleep. I’m not thinking clearly, but I know I’m on a mountaintop, in a fire tower, in the middle of the night and a lightning storm in progress and it seems there is a fire outside the house. With my headlamp on, I step out into the night storm to put the fire out...

That was in mid-August, 2018.

There are thousands of such fire spotters like me across the US national parks. Some of them are paid, and some are volunteers. My fire tower in Montana’s Glacier National Park was built in 1934.

Everything about the towers are designed to look out. My tiny home has 19 large windows and one windowed door. All the furniture sits no higher than two feet, so none of the windows are blocked.

Even in bad fire years, there’s a rhythm to the days. I usually wake up to early morning light, make a steamy cup of coffee on my stove and drink it outside on a chair, while listening to the birds and insects. Without a doubt, this is my favorite part of the day.

After the drink, I use my powerful telescope to scan miles of the edges where mountains meet the sky in case something wrong has escaped my eyes. At 10 am, I report to the Forest Service Center in Kalispell the weather at my location.

My official working day ends at 4:30 pm. It means I’m free to take a walk before I return to my tower to enjoy the beautiful sunset! This is a long-drawn-out process with breath-taking color and light changes. If I don’t think it’s a show worth watching, I should probably find another job.

Despite living in such a quiet house with killer views, fire spotters’ life is definitely not for everyone. The first summer that I was hired in the 1970s, I was the third fire spotter of the season—the first two decided in a matter of days that it wasn’t what they imagined, or perhaps they never imagined how the loneliness would affect them.