Getting older is getting better

When I look into the mirror, my focus is drawn to the developing ripples in the skin around my eyes.

Whoa.

Wrinkles.

They give me pause, even concern.

I think: “Maybe I’ve been up too long. Maybe I squint too often. Maybe it’s time to start using some kind of anti-aging cream.”

The real me surfaces and my reaction to the reminder of mortality is amusing. After all, growing older is for the lucky ones, since the alternative is dying young, the greatest of human tragedies.

Despite being a convinced Christian, my mortality haunts me often; always has.

Getting older elicits angst in me for sure, but in recent years I have embraced aging as I have come to understand how the passing of time can serve to improve us if we let it.

Actually, we have to do more than just “let it.” We have to want it. We have to see the beauty in it. We have to understand that aging is a gift.

But, instead, we run from it. The world is full of people who want nothing more than to stay young, look young and act young. It’s cultural psychosis, collective madness.

All fools get to be young, but none get to be wise.

It’s by divine design that we age gracefully. We are programmed for it. After all, as we age we see things differently, hear things differently, interpret things differently. We become more.

I can remember hanging out with my father when I was a 20-something fool and gawking at the young women of my age. He’d chuckle and call them “kids.” What I saw then were certainly not kids to me, but now I get it. Today, to me, if a woman isn’t 30, she’s a kid.

But embracing the aging process is beyond difficult during these strange days in which we live. We are a society of people driven by the imagery of capitalism. Young and pretty sells and as a result we’re fed a whole bunch of it— so much that we accept those images as reality and prop them up as what we ought to be or at least what we ought to try to be.

But there was a time when we heralded our elders in this country because they were the wise ones, the best ones. They had the answers to our questions, the solutions to our problems.

In some cultures, the elderly are still on top of that social ladder, but not in this country, where the age of instant information has supplanted the “need” for our elders.

It’s a disturbing realization for me and one of a growing number of reasons I feel more genuine and at home hand-feeding bread to my chickens at sunrise than I do staring into this computer during the day trying to figure out how to give our readers what they deserve and, since my family must survive in the cesspool of capitalism, how to lure in new readers.

But as I said earlier, I am one of the lucky ones, not only because I have been so far given the chance to grow older, but also because I have been gifted with a heart that longs for self-realization, an understanding of who I am, what I am, why I am and where I am.

That’s a hard place to get these days because the mirror cannot reflect the nasty and wicked contents our polished shells and distracted minds seek to hide.

It’s an impossible place to get if you aren’t trying.

But, it’s the most important place for us all to get— that place where we can see ourselves for what we really are and, perhaps more importantly, why and how we got that way.

Because being granted time (growing older) gives us the opportunity to right wrongs and change our course to one that leaves fewer wrongs in its wake. We can do neither, though, until we work as hard on polishing the person inside as we do the one on the outside.