There are, in my not at all calculated or based on any real evidence opinion, approximately a hundred-thousand-gazillion products that you can buy to erase your face.
Maybe more. Like I said, I haven’t counted.
Fine lines & wrinkles? There’s a cream for that. Actually, there are probably seven hundred creams for that.
Deep lines and furrows? There’s a product – or many dozens of products for you to choose from. Smooth them out or fill them in or plump them up, erasing any and all evidence that you’ve ever worried about anything for one second.
Laugh lines? Bottles and tubes and cute looking jars with clever sounding titles line the shelves, promising that no one will ever, ever, ever know you’ve laughed. Ever.
If the story of our lives is written on our faces, what does it say that we will go to such lengths to erase the evidence that we’ve ever really lived?
We do. Go to lengths, I mean. The statistics are there, right out in the open, for anyone to see. Go ahead, Google it.
We’re bent on bending time backwards, or at least determined to remove the traces of it.
Determined that the world will never know that we’ve known life and that life’s known us.
Well, not me. Of course. And not you. Of course. But a whole lot of the rest of us.
It’s not that we can’t see the beauty of age. We love seeing the couple in their 80s, bent and wrinkled and holding hands in the park or at church on Sundays. We love seeing our parents’ wrinkles, if we’re lucky enough to be still seeing them.
“Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.” —Mark Twain
But not our own wrinkles.
Not those, of course.
And there are bunches and bunches of us stuck somewhere between “it’s been a few years since I remembered to moisturize” and “damn – this wrinkle cream worked so much better when I was twenty-five”.
We find it just a bit hard to summon grace enough to smile at the memory of the laughter that created those lines around our mouths and at the edge of the eye. Because, of course, if we do smile we’ll just be adding to the problem.
And honest? I’ve never met the woman who sees the furrow that seems to have become a permanent part of her brow (an uninvited part, I might add) as evidence that she’s loved deep and worried deep about those she’s deeply loved.
The irony is, of course, that worrying about worry lines only deepens them.
But this story that our lines outline? It’s one of loving and worrying and laughing and living through the hard and the sweet and the bother and the craziness that is our lot as flawed human beings living with other flawed human beings.
This story that’s written on our faces and in our hearts and in not a few journals is a lovely story, a human story, a story that’s made us who we are, broken us some to get us there, and maybe taught us some really wise things like the fact that sunsets, a nice cup of tea, and clean sheets can almost always do you some good.
It’s our own personal story of heartbreak and healing, hope and despair, forgiveness and redemption. Just, you know, regular human stuff.
It is the story of life.“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” (~Stanisław Jerzy Lec)
It might not have been smooth. Probably if you’ve lived more than a couple of decades it wasn’t. But it has been real. Messy real. Beautiful real. Breathtakingly-hard real. Human real.
A really lovely story, like the Velveteen Rabbit’s was, the one that made him really real.
It’s a gorgeous story,
like the one who’s wearing it.
~xo,
LuAnne
