Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. ~ Mark Twain
Mark Twain obviously wasn’t a woman. For a woman, growing older often means dealing with graying hair, potbellies, and stretch marks that never go away. It frequently involves abandoning the bikini for a bathing suit with a skirt (like your mother used to wear) and choosing Easy Spirit shoes over sexy high heels. Let’s not forget that aging gracefully often requires a team of beauty consultants, hairdressers, and, in extreme cases, plastic surgeons to undo the damage that simply living causes to the body. However, the key word here is shell. What happens to the outside of you—like sagging breasts and that heinous little black hair that grows on your chin (and nipples)—doesn’t have to indicate what is going on inside. Even the wrinkles, which Twain poetically associates with smiles, are mirrors of your life. Sometimes they reflect happiness, sometimes sadness, and often the exact opposite of what you expected. But this too can be a good thing.
Aging Gracefully is About Inner Confidence
When people refer to aging gracefully, they are typically talking about the outer shell. This means that even though someone has reached their 40s, 50s, or 60s (or beyond), they still look great. People may say, “Wow, looks like life has been good to her!” In contrast, the person who looks weathered on the outside is often assumed to have lived a hard life and not aged as gracefully as they should. But in both cases, the bystander could be wrong. Aging gracefully isn’t necessarily about how well or poorly our bodies or faces have weathered the storm—it’s about how quickly we were able to walk away and rebuild.
Aging gracefully isn’t about looking great at 50. It isn’t about maintaining an impeccable appearance or wearing clothes that make you look prim and proper. It’s about accepting and embracing the continuous growth that is you. It’s about knowing that, although you can’t see around all corners in life, you’ll still be okay when you make the turn, no matter what awaits you. It’s about confidence in being a woman, in being someone you love, and in being more than you ever thought you could be. For many, it’s about counting your blessings and appreciating the many ways your life has changed you or someone else for the better. Aging gracefully is about letting go of material things and idealized notions of what you should be, should have, how much money you should have saved, or what you should have done. It’s about accepting your choices as your own, taking responsibility for your faults, mistakes, and perfections. Aging gracefully is about putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward at all times, and being grateful for every second you’ve been able to breathe.
Keeping your face pretty, your body fit, your clothes ironed, and your face wrinkle-free is often the result of people who care deeply about themselves. It’s true that people who care about their appearance often care about others and exude a self-confidence that carries them through life. But aging gracefully means learning to let go of self-conscious judgments and outward evaluations that lead you to judge the integrity of one’s life based on their appearance.
Aging gracefully is about finally being comfortable in your skin. It’s about realizing that, while you weren’t always perfect, you did the best you knew how at the time. It’s about believing in things like God (no matter your religion) and Karma, and realizing that your destiny, your future, and your outlook on life come more from within you than from any external factor. When you choose to be happy, to feel satisfied, to trust, to let go of control, and to expect the best from others, you’ve learned to age gracefully—whether or not you can afford wrinkle cream.
Another aspect of aging gracefully is realizing that you don’t have to reach a certain age to do so. You don’t have to be retired on a front porch rocking chair to look at your life and feel good. Even teenagers, blossoming into themselves and falling on their faces repeatedly, are aging gracefully when they open themselves to all the positives life has to offer. A toddler learning to walk, getting up 600 times to try again, is gracefully aging into a person full of love, commitment, tenacity, and integrity. The elderly man, who is 100, sitting next to the elderly woman who is 99, is aging gracefully when they keep their minds open to the fact that they still have more to learn, more to love, and more to give and take from a life that is simply a shell of who we are. Just as a house or a car doesn’t define who or what we are, a fancy hairstyle and the absence of wrinkles do not define our lives or the moments in them.
“To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty and find the best in others…to leave the world a bit better and know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” So says Ralph Waldo Emerson. This is also what it means to age gracefully.
