What Happened to My Face?

I have never been overly concerned about my appearance and certainly not about aging. When I was in my twenties I told my self that I would always look like I was in my twenties, and I honestly believed this to be true up until a couple of years ago. I thought that if I willed it, I would look the same at seventy that I had at twenty-eight. Those were the wonderful days of living in a grand magical illusion. I'm forty one, twenty-nine years away from seventy, and I am quite aware that I don't look like a twenty-eight year old or a thirty-eight year old for the matter. It seems as though over night, my face has changed and not for the better. Unless I'm smiling I think that I look quite awful. My hands are different also. What happened to the youthful skin on my hands? No longer can I eat an entire pie over the course of a day, apparently I have to eat in moderation and exercise if I want to wear clothes with zippers.

Here is the odd thing, or really it's not so odd but rather common. I feel exactly the same inside even though I am different outside. For most of my life I have heard people talk about feeling the same as they did when they were a kid even though their bodies had grown old; now I am beginning to understand that insight. I'm not old by any means, and many people consider forty-one to be a baby still. Fortunately, a change in wisdom and insight occurs with age, but the inner feeling of youthfulness stays the same. It is mind blowing to think that should I live to eighty that I would have the same inner feeling that I have carried with me since childhood. What an experience that would be, both amazing and utterly frustrating having a body that is out of sync with your spirit.

In the beginning I looked forward to forty and to every year that would follow, because I cherished all of the wonderful lessons that I had learned and would continue learning with age. I still love the concept of aging and growing in wisdom, but I hate what it's doing to my face.