“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know “why” I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.” – Will Rogers
This summer we took some wonderful hiking trips and on one of them I ended up with my legs covered in a rash from poison oak. That’s okay. I would do it all over again. But I do have some nasty pink scars left on my legs that I scratched so much that I think I invited some varicose veins to the surface to join the fun. Sometimes I just “own” the scars, sometimes I cover them up with concealer and sometimes I look up telephone numbers of doctors who inject veins to make them go away.
I think I’m at the stage where I’m on the fence of aging gracefully versus fighting the fight to keep a youthful appearance. When I was in my late thirties, I found a cool magazine clipping and I hung it on my mirror. It had a picture of a beautiful woman with a few lines on her face. It said something to the effect that “Beauty is accumulative and all of these lines are just character marks from the story of your life.” That sounded so right . . . . when I was in my thirties.
“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.” – Kurt Vonnegut
I love that quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous commencement speech. It makes me feel winsome and hopeful at the same time. When I’m 75, I guess I’ll look back at pictures taken of me now and wish that I looked like what I look like right now.
In today’s world of giant, overwhelming beauty stores like Ulta and Sephora, of every procedure available to turn you into whatever boob size/nose size/butt size/movie star you want, of impossibly attractive 80-year-old actresses like Jane Fonda, and households of Kardashian sisters becoming multi-millionaires primarily due to the hustling of their collective beauty, it’s hard to decide what your own limits are to “preserve and protect” versus letting it all go and just being free.
I guess it really does come down to doing what you want, what you value and what makes you feel good with the realization that you can’t stop others from doing what they feel the need to do and be. Do you want to be that perfectly preserved, valuable, beautiful, ageless Barbie doll in the box or the much lived, loved, tattered and torn, worn for the wear, kindly and comely Velveteen rabbit? Probably most of us will end up being something in-between and that is okay. We have to forgive the flawless Barbies and the sanctimonious rabbits, though. They have the right to their decisions and we have the right to ours. Perhaps if we feel love and compassion for all of us as we work through this aging process together, those feelings will glow through and as a whole we will see beauty like we have never seen and it will be timeless.