ANOTHER DECADE MARKED

Do we all live our lives waiting for the next birthday? None of us knows what our bodies will have done to us in a year. The fact is, my body has been kind to me. I feel much better now than I did a decade ago.

My family doesn't know what to gift me with any more. There is no reasonable need that remains unfilled in my life. Statistics would have my family shopping here for me. However, our society fosters a 'one-size-fits-all' leaning, in which case it might be more useful to shop here.

A psychologist friend of mine told me many years ago that we go through life carrying the image of ourselves as we were as 15 years. She neglected to mention that as age loses youth, it also loses memory. I have no idea what I looked like as a 15 year old. Whatever it was is certainly not what my mirror reflects back at me. No, indeed, my mother has taken total control of my life and image. She shows herself every time I look in a mirror and keeps me well hidden behind her. Naturally, to confuse me, she has let her hair grow as long as mine and she wears the same frames on her glasses as I. Or so I thought until I figured out she couldn't get into anyone's digital camera. When I saw pictures of myself I realized it is the ultimate insult Nature has handed us, not my mother at all. Our bodies change at a different rate than our brains. Our brains started with wrinkles and get younger as we get older. Our bodies start young and grow old and wrinkled. The outer skin stretches and becomes what our mother's told us to fear. Stop making faces or your face will stick that way. Yes, that has happened...all those years of girdles, bras, weight gains and losses...bodies have formed a revolution and will put up with that abuse no longer. In their revolt, they become like the picture of Dorian Gray only not out of your body...for real. We wear everything we have eaten, all the hours of sun we soaked up, the second-hand smoke before we knew better, and all the toxins our world could provide.

However, if we ignore the mirror and pictures, and just let ourselves feel as we wish to be, age becomes totally irrelevant. It is, after all, just a number that says how long we have been having fun.