EACH of us encounters those sad stormy days, when we feel very small, very fragile and very frightened, as if one might shatter into a thousand pieces and break into heartrendering sobs at simple as “are you feeling better now?”
Today, I made peace with the past: with that body and face I’ve been born with, embracing the lines that stare back at me, the parts that sag in the middle, or stick out where they shouldn’t, hair that used to keep a curl, now lanky and brittle.
It will be a lot of doing, learning to love all the personal pilgrimage places we’ve been. How does one flourish in old age? When do we finally accept ourselves exactly as we are today? Tomorrow or next week? Or when we lose twenty pounds?
Isn’t acceptance, acknowledging the reality of a situation. We are heavier than we’d like to be, or once the kutis porcelana (smooth skin) is now ruddy or sallow, or we’ve got grey streaks or the legging just doesn’t work for us anymore and just accept that other women are beauties glistening with Vitamin B and pasteurized milk?
I didn’t lose myself all at once, rubbed out my face over the years, washing away my precious years, the same way carving on stone are worn down by water.
Life batters us, you feel it more as you grow older, whether you’re rich or poor, private or public, that wound we suffer maybe an open cut, or a slow hemorrhage of the soul.
At its most romantic, love is something that nearly, but never was and now—never will be as in the movie “Brief Encounter.” Why did that movie was placed at the top for the most romantic file of all time, while “Casablanca” and “Gone with the Wind,” were second and third respectively. How does love flourish? Who is she that makes it?
We all have met her, that special woman who draws you into her orb with a gentle smile and eyes that light up as you tell her how you have been. She fascinates men, women, children, and animals, for her complete attention is soothing and hypnotic, walking away from her is like having bathed in beautiful, warm light.
It’s called LOVE, the ancient beauty secret we’ve read in books, available to all of us, even when we are genuinely interested in others, in a graciousness that is compelling like that soulful woman, novelist, M. Bonner wrote in 1926, ”would that each of us were such a woman, would that each of us could become…”
Today, my after seventy face felt more comfortable than anything I’ve lived with previously. The most powerful beauty potion we’ve been taught is self confidence. One looked better because you felt better.
Failure and grief as well as success and love have served me well. I have tapped on that most hard won of youth dews. Authors call it wisdom..
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