Once We Were Young and Beautiful. Now We’re Just Beautiful. We're Too Old to Want to Be Young

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

A memory, the meaning of aging well, and hope

Dear Reader: this is a piece from February, five years ago with a few updates.

It’s both cool and dark out right now, ten after six about four hours north of Nairobi. The restaurant light is on. Food won’t be ready until eight.

Last night the tall cook sliced up a fat, thick, in-season mango for my growling stomach, and delivered it to the door of my thatched hut here in Ol Pejeta.

This is of the world’s great conservation facilities, the last home and hope of the black rhino.

Black and white rhinos, happily, are beginning to thrive again here, having gone from barely twenty to more than 100, which for the rhino population is the number where they are considered a “key” population.

Babies are to be celebrated here for they speak to hope. We love young things because they allow us to believe in a future.

Simon, my E-Trip Africa guide and driver who picked me up in Nairobi yesterday to deliver me here, was following one of Ol Pejeta’s trucks as we were about to visit the resident veterinarian when we passed two rhinos: mom and baby. We slowed to a stop, the road’s dust swirling around us, the high grasses waving in the wind.

Rhinos are beautiful.

They are squat, horned, wide, chubby, barely able to see.

And they are beautiful.

Let’s talk about beauty.

I am struck, as I just turned 67, at how much more beautiful I am now than ever I was as a young woman. This, of course has, nothing whatsoever to do with the webs of encroaching wrinkles that inform my face, the increasing sag of aging skin on my once-taught calves and thighs.

Those observations about my aging body could drive me mad, should I let them. For some whose sad comments I read online, they do indeed cause pain.

I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit at times to thinking that the turkey gobbler neck that has begun to show, a gift from my sainted mother, would look better tightened up. The slight droop and deepening lines at the edges of my slightly-askew smile, also a gift from my sainted mother, would look better if it were snugged a bit.

I don’t know too many aging women who don’t pull back the skin on their faces a bit to see what a lift would do for lifting their spirits.

How unfortunate that we don’t take the same assessments on the state of our souls as opposed to the sometimes sad state of our skins. Those assessments are often far more honest and fair.

We can do far more about the state of our souls than the state of our skin.

Part of what inspired my thoughts this morning was someone’s comment on an article I wrote about how someone had shamed me about a preference in music. She wrote:

“Mensa! My IQ got me in, and my EQ got me out.”

Some many years ago I was drawn to the idea of joining Mensa if for no other reason than I was terribly insecure. Thanks to my brother’s nighttime assaults on me as an adolescent, I felt shamed and dirty.

My hips began to evolve in their inevitable, genetically-driven horizontal expansion, thanks to my dad’s side of the family. He was vicious about it, as though somehow I was morally depraved for growing saddle bags.

I translated the condition of my body into the condition of my intellect.

I felt stupid, fat and ugly. The female shame trifecta.

I carried that self-hate for decades, all through my youth and well into late middle-age. In other words, while I was young, I had no concept of being pretty or youthful or attractive or anything we associate with youth while we have it.

Many of you can relate, especially women. While young we are so often utterly obsessed with our appearance, so self-absorbed and insecure that we can’t enjoy youth’s fleeting gifts.

Finally when we are freed of the prison of youth’s insecurities, we moan for our youth, forgetting all the shitshows that had come with it.

What we’re really saying, I suspect, is that we want our youth into which we can pour our older selves. The wish of all of us, always.

A fool’s errand, that we can’t appreciate what we have when we have it. Then when we don’t, we squander where we are right now mooning over the past.

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

I love the above photo. A commenter wrote that the woman would “look better were she smiling.”

No. This woman doesn’t owe us that. Like the rhinos we passed yesterday, in all their craggy grey glory, she is glorious.

Beauty is wasted on those of us who worry so horribly about losing it to age that we become ugly.

Many years ago, I walked into a plastic surgery office in Costa Rica.

The place was jam-packed full of gorgeous, flawless women. They were there for procedures to fix what was already perfect, terrified by time into spending their treasure to keep what had been given them to enjoy in the moment. Yet they couldn’t.

I walked out, horrified.

I see the same worrying and compulsive wrinkle-hating online. Time inexorably carves that worry into the very youth that we are losing by worrying about losing our youth.

In my case, youth left the building decades ago. Our souls are a different story entirely. Perhaps that’s the real gift of age, to reclaim youth in old age, which we all too often failed to enjoy while young.

You and I can reclaim our youthful souls.

Let’s stop wanting to be told we look so young for our age.

How meaningless in the great scheme of humanity.

Our faces are the blank stones onto which we carve our character. Mine reflects the internal work I’ve done. It reveals if I behave with compassion, empathy, personal responsibility, the willingness to care, to listen, to hear.

Those offer us far more grace than having an angel’s face.

I’ve lately had cause to really enjoy who I have become and am becoming. The older I get, the less I worry about whether whether the skin on my knees looks like an elephant’s ass. It does. Get over it.

As long as they work most of the time, I’m happy.

The older I get, the more time I spend with animals that have also gotten old, are injured, or are slow. While so many around me will flock to the babies, and who doesn’t, the old horse with the bum leg is just as deserving of love - if not much more so - for the work he has given us and the price he paid willingly for that hard work.

Such as it is with all old things. They deserve even more care and respect, for they have put in the time. They bear the scars and pain of long life, losses and what wisdom those experiences might have conveyed. If we’re fortunate, we get to learn from them.

If we’re wise, and I often am no such thing, we will treat our aging selves with love and respect for the time we’ve put in. We will value the vessel we inhabit.

If we’re foolish, we shove what is old away and out of sight. The old are the sign posts of where we must all end up, if we are so fortunate to have long life.

Youth may have unlined beauty, and as with all young things (other than newborns, who have the distressing characteristic of looking like a beet-red Winston Churchill) they express an ideal.

Yet in our society we prey on the young for sex, for their profit potential, to be come future smokers and users of all kinds of pharmaceuticals, bad food, name your poison.

Youth for the young doesn’t last long. Their youth has been stolen from them, as it was in my case.

I suspect there we believe that if only we looked young, we might regain our innocence. That somehow the appearance of youth might deliver us to what we imagined was a better time.

I wouldn’t trade my barking back, my barked shins, and my skin that looks like bark on a bad day for my 18-year-old face for anything.

True beauty is earned. The wizened Mother Theresa was beautiful because of who she was.

Like the great rhino is beautiful. She is fully herself, as are we all, especially when we age without apology.

Part of the wisdom of encroaching age is the ability, should we care to grow it, to see beauty in endings. In losses. The pain of passage and the inevitability of death. The great gorgeousness of age, as I add more years to my ledger, is that increasingly I see the beauty of simply being.

Wisdom, which may or may not accompany age, may allow us to shed what doesn’t work. The crippling self-doubts of youth. The attachment to appearance as our only value to society.

We learn to love a cool morning, birdsongs and a hot cuppa joe while iridescent African starlings dance around the table looking for crumbs. We learn to love life precisely because we see its sunset.

From Maria Popova: …Simone de Beauvoir observed: “In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”

Moving through the stages of life and meeting each on its own terms is the supreme art of living — the ultimate test of self-respect and self-love. Often, what most blunts our vitality is the tendency for the momentum of a past stage to steer the present one, even though our priorities and passions have changed beyond recognition.

Popova further writes: Bertrand Russell touched on this in his astute observation that growing older contentedly is matter of being able to “make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”

Five years after writing most of the above in Kenya, I am in Newport, at a condo on the central Oregon coast. My friend Melissa and I are here to watch the last of this year’s King Tides smash against the rocks in Depoe Bay.

She’s going to walk the coast at low tide this afternoon. I’m going to read.

She’s 67. I’m 72.

Both of us were beautiful as little girls. And both of us sincerely believed we were stupid, fat and ugly.

We didn’t become young until we were old.

Now we’re beautiful.

Let’s play.

Photo by Helena Pfisterer on Unsplash