Growing Older

I was speaking with my son today, mentioning that the bread I used for making some toast was old, and it won’t taste that good. My son’s answer was a great wake up call to me! He said: “if is old, doesn’t mean is not good!” That triggered two words into my mind: beauty and survival. How powerful is that!?

As a child, I have experienced an extreme form of communism were we did not have food in the shops, nor sweets or chocolate,, never tasted a banana or an orange until I was about 7-8 years old. We had two hours of heating during the night, no electricity in the evening/night and so on. That environment kept people in a survival mode. We did what we had to do: we survived. Now some of those people are mentally strong, kind and supportive while others developed some not so good coping mechanisms.

The wake up call was related to beauty. My beauty!
I’m getting older, as so all the other lucky humans. Lucky to be alive (we are not debating anything else here). Being alive it is a privilege indeed, that many of my friends didn’t benefit from. And I miss them. But now we are going back to talking about ageing (beautifully). Remember: beauty is in the eye of the beholder! We tend to associate ageing with being ugly or even with not being good enough, and that it doesn’t make us feel comfortable. It can lower our self-esteem, confidence, can makes us feel low, depressed, anxious, avoidant and we could experience panic attacks.

How can I change what I feel, if I don’t like it?

With practice - we know that practice makes us better, and not perfect, I or you can make a conscious decision of learning to accept that wrinkles are part of the process. It takes time, and maybe some guidance.
Remember: You are beautiful because of those scars that taught you important lessons, and helped you to grow. You are beautiful because you are alive now, and you didn’t give up when it was too hard. Purely and gracefully, You are beautiful!