There is a time in life for everything.
Watching your lover sleep, that perfect bud of a mouth resting against the pillow, vibrant hair like a halo around an angel’s face.
There is such beauty in youth. Such radiance. We can hardly help being captivated by it.
But there’s a trap.
And we have a culture that keeps feeding us into it, like pressing pasta dough through a chute.
We want to stay young forever. That’s the mandate. We want to look young forever. That’s the trap.
Instead, we could appreciate how things change over time.
That tiny waistline. It seems we all had one. It thickens over time. The skin softens, the contours shift. The body begins to tell a different story.
That baby you chose to bring forth changes the body forever. Some of those changes don’t become obvious until after menopause, when we undergo yet another transformation.
There is a toll exacted from nurturing another human life within our own. A profound expenditure, physical and otherwise.
Do men even know this?
And when did the allure of the model on the screen become the standard against which a woman measures herself? Or discovers that someone else is measuring her?
Youth does not last forever.
Part of this seems regrettable. Of course it does. There are things about youth worth missing. The ease of movement, the resilience, the seemingly inexhaustible energy. The uncomplicated pleasure of inhabiting a body that hasn’t yet begun to make demands of its own.
But trying to recapture that glow, that radiance, can keep us distracted from the more important work of recognizing that our time on Earth is finite.
Instead of embracing our changing perspectives, the deepening understanding, the growing wisdom that could serve the world so well, we keep trying to pedal the bicycle backwards.
And we double down on the effort.
Hours at the gym. Madly walking, running, swimming our way back toward a version of ourselves that no longer exists.
Instead of enjoying these activities for their own sake, for the sheer pleasure of moving through the world in the bodies we have, we turn them into labor. Another obligation. Another contest with time.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be strong, healthy, capable. Quite the contrary. But there is an enormous difference between caring for the body and declaring war upon its natural progression.
And what do we sacrifice in the process?
Attention, for one thing. The very attention that might allow us to recognize what is happening within us as the years accumulate.
We become so preoccupied with what is disappearing that we scarcely notice what is arriving.
A different kind of beauty. A different kind of intimacy. The freedom that sometimes comes with having less to prove. The ability to see through things that once dazzled us. The recognition that tenderness has little to do with the firmness of flesh.
Years pass quickly. All the more quickly when we are distracted.
And perhaps that is what troubles me most. Not the aging itself, but how much of our precious, finite time we are persuaded to spend resisting it.
I return to that sleeping lover. The softness of the mouth, the hair upon the pillow. I understand the impulse to hold that moment forever.
But the lover will change. So will the one who watches.
Perhaps the greater beauty is not in preserving that moment, but in remaining present for all the moments that follow. To witness the changes without withdrawing our love. To recognize the beloved in every incarnation.
Including ourselves.
I wish I had known more sooner.
But I know it now.
