The ‘mirror’ truth
Ever look in the mirror and realize that something about your face has changed; there are no wrinkles or lines but it is just different and you are left staring at the image before you wonder how much more it will change.
Our mirrors are so close to many of us, we wake up every morning and before we even hop out of bed we are checking out which side of our face has the pillow prints and if our eyes and mouth corners are free of any overnight build-up.
Strange though how we keep looking at the same mirror every day and never really notice that every day it shows in our faces that we are getting older. Yes, as scary as it for some of us, particularly women, we are aging all the time but it takes a while to hit us, and in many instances, like a ton of bricks!
Remember when we are little and growing up how we would dress up in our parents’ clothes and anything hanging around the house that was twice our size all in the name of wanting to act grown-up. Call it kids at play, but every child wants to grow up fast and even when we are teenagers we want to act older.
In our adolescent circles there was always that boy who grew his beard to trick people into thinking he was in his mid-twenties or older, and that girl who wore make-up and combed her hair a certain way to have us believe she is not the sweet sixteen baby we know her to be.
Oh, what great days those were, but the funny thing is most people go through life ‘putting on a show’ all the time in a serious attempt to hide how old they are. Women hesitate to reveal their true age often waiting for you to guess with that sweet yet serious smile which says, “You better guess younger or else.” Men on the other hand always seem to deepen their voices whenever that question comes up so you would put them much older than they are.
But that is the beauty of our mirrors, they never lie and behind all the ‘acts’ they quietly tells us that we are getting older. Saying people have had the same face since they were children, is not exactly true. We are likely to have some of the same features but there is nothing similar about our faces from childhood to the present day.
Mirrors show us even in our mid-twenties that maturity changes our faces and that motherhood can add a few lines, which is why when we wake up one day and look we don’t recognise the person staring back at us for a few minutes. Truth is some of us never recognise that person and we go through life acting as though we discovered the foundation of youth.
There is a quiet beauty in aging, and those of us who reject that inevitability, miss it. We do not have to be fifty or older (when they say life begins) to embrace the fact that we are getting older; it can happen in our twenties and nothing changes as far as enjoying our youth goes.
There is a saying which points out that youth is a temporary state of affairs. Whether we choose to believe it or not, it is true. No matter how many facelifts or botox some of us try reality always sets in, so why not just accept the fact and while you are at it, enjoy every bit of being young. That way we are likely to enjoy old age too, for it is but an extension of our childhood, according to one writer.
It may hit you the next time you look in the mirror that there is something different about the way you look; how about smiling back and saying, definitely. (stabroekscene@stabroeknews.com)