A funny thing is happening to me as I age. I find myself becoming more compassionate towards other people.
Except the ones who don't use deodorant before boarding public transport, or
waste electricity, or treat public areas like their own personal
pigsties ...
May I start that sentence again?
A funny
thing is happening to me as I age. I find myself becoming more
compassionate towards other people, as I notice my body taking on traits that
I used to ridicule in the past.
Once upon a time (and I say this from the lofty perch of my thirties), I was young and glorious and invincible and ruthless*.
If
you were lucky enough to grow up in a country where you didn't have to
worry about where your next meal was coming from, or if your house would
still have a roof in the morning, then you would have probably felt the same way.
Plump with collagen, buzzing with high metabolisms, turgid with potential, it was easy for us to dismiss overweight
people as "lazy" and people who were trapped in
unfulfilled lives as "losers".
We prized confrontation and rebellion over discretion and compromise.
We couldn't understand how someone could just "let themselves go", and swore that it would never happen to us.
And
then of course, the best revenge, the hardest slap in the face, was
that it did happen to us. (Try to hold on to this sweet thought the
next time some bright young thing disses you.)
The first changes
that we notice are in our faces and bodies. In a gruesome parody of
adolescence, we find hair where there wasn't any before.
Wrinkles have been thrown in as a kind of booby prize, and knees twinge when you walk up and down stairs (well, mine do).
When you are young and bits of you are effortlessly defying gravity, it is easy to say that you are going to age gracefully.
But you know what? The other day, I caught sight of my behind in the bathroom mirror.
It frightened me.
In that moment, the thought of paying someone to install extra scaffolding in that region (and perhaps remove some debris) didn't seem so repugnant.
Thankfully, there is a plus side to losing control of our bodies. At the very least, we are reminded of the things that we will always have. We can even work on them for free, without going to Thailand on plastic surgery tours.
Brains, a great personality, and a sense of humour. When the looks go (and they will go), we're going to need them. If we can just remember that, I think we'll have a ball.
* Although I didn't realise it at the time.