getting older

less reluctantly and more gracefully. that's been my mantra for a couple of months, and i think (i hope) it's taking hold. really. on the one hand, i've always loved my gray hair. i color my hair not to cover the gray, but to give life to the rest of it which is a rather boring brown. the boring brown does not compliment the gray. actually, it's really silver hair. shiny, pretty, tinsel like silver. someday, i will let it all be. when there's enough of it to make more of an impact and not be just flecks in the boring brown.

but anyway, a couple of conversations i've had lately, along with my self absorbsion realization were impacted yesterday by the arrival of kevin's aarp magazine. he turned 50 last year and so he joined so that we could get discounts from it. but we keep forgetting to mention it and get the discount.

gosh i'm having a hard time getting to my point. and that is, the magazine yesterday was the one with jamie lee curtis on the cover. and how can you not notice that here's this movie star going completely against the hollywood norm of never looking older than 30. and she looks great! i think she's becoming my new role model. yet even better than the pictures of her, are her words in the interview. she has a wisdom that i hope to someday reach. here are some exerpts that struck me as relevant to me just now:

“I want to be older. I actually think there’s an incredible amount of self-knowledge that comes with getting older. I feel way better now than I did when I was 20. I’m stronger, I’m smarter in every way, I’m so much less crazy than I was then.

“If I can challenge old ideas about aging, I will feel more and more invigorated. I want to represent this new way. I want to be a new version of the 70-year-old woman. Vital, strong, very physical, very agile. I think that the older I get, the more yoga I’m going to do.

“My biggest concern is that I will calcify as I get older. I am a creature of habit: I wear the same clothes; I eat the same food; I am very regular in all of my activities. I can get lulled into complacency. Decalcification means constant evolution, where I’m constantly trying to shed skins and shed ideas.

“I look at my relationships all the time. If a relationship is really negative on an ongoing basis, what am I doing in it? What am I protecting? Am I protecting someone from the hurt and sting
of losing me? Because that’s not healthy. It’s not good.

“As we get older, we say goodbye to a lot of people. We say goodbye to our friends, to our family, and discover our capacity to love and communicate and have intimacy—real intimacy, not the superficial intimacy we had in our youth. Strip away the bulls---; be done with that. Ask yourself these two questions: Did I learn to live wisely? Did I love well?”