I was walking down Bungan Beach yesterday. My now normal afternoon stroll, and I was walking with the critical, asshole me. She was telling me I wasn’t tan enough, thin enough, toned enough. She was really grinding me good. I was plotting, as I always do, about what I could do to live up to her impossible standards for me.
“I guess when I get home, I will take out a loan and get a facelift, and a tummy tuck, I will spend the rest of my vacation chasing the sun and getting myself so tan...fat looks better tanned.”
On and on it went. By the time I got to the end of the beach, I was really on a tare. As I turned around, I had a thought...
“What the fuck is wrong with you? You are here in Australia on a magnificent beach and you, YOU are ruining it by this constant and incessant narrative about how much you aren’t enough and need to be better and all the things! You just missed the entire point of living...consumed with self flagellation, you are destroying the peace of mind you intended to enjoy while here.”
And I was right. I could see how much I had missed the point entirely. I had lost the plot on living.
Then the most terrifying thought landed...
“You are now on the backside of life, it is going to go down hill and all your efforts to the contrary: the botox, filler, tanning, working out and the like is only temporary solutions for an ongoing problem that is only going to get worse...”
I will tell you I felt like dying in that moment. Like I wanted to rush into the sea and just disappear. Yes, that is the level of vanity I am living with currently. Because I cannot stave off time and gravity and other progressions of aging, I just couldn’t handle it. And I wanted this quite desperately to not be true. That somehow, someway I could circumvent time and its ravishes.
So I stood there is some sort of suspended animation...cross with myself for ruining my own good time and now having a full scale, implosion of existential angst that was leveling me as I stood there, toes in the sand, aquamarine water waving at me from just beyond the shore.
And I had another thought...
“What are you gonna do? Are you going to run around and try to beat time? Are you going to fight a battle that you cannot win? Are you dedicate all your resources to shoring up that which will ultimately fail anyway? What the fuck are you gonna do now?”
And I hung there. Hanging there, just existing on the fine, razor thin line between living and dying. In the time I have left, who exactly am I going to be...and isn’t that a more important question than tilting at the windmill of time buying goopy products and spending a small fortune on things that will not ever ultimately work? I am at the point now where there are holes in this bucket and all efforts to repair will ultimately fail...because that is the cost of living. Failure of the mind and the body, but not the spirit.
The spirit knows no time and is only bound by body and mind because we tether ourselves to this impossible standard that no one ever meets or attains, or even if they do, it is only a temporal toehold on a precariously shifting ledge. No one can stop time. Not with botox and filler. Not with hair dye. Not with exercise and tanning. We are of the nature to grow old and die and there is just no way to get around that pesky, heartrendering fact.
I dropped to my knees there is the sand and wished for some other realization. For some other way to go back in time and reclaim all the time I spend wasting it. I wished to gather up all the time wasted on the pursuit of things that do not matter...like shopping and dressing and all the shit I have spent so much effort acquiring, clutching them to me like seashells on the shore, as if in the gathering them up, I could own them and they me and together we would live forever. But I am not a shell, or perhaps, maybe I was immediately before this whole thoughtful debacle.
I saw the folly in my thoughts and actions. I saw that I am never going to beat time. But I might be able to improve my relationship to it. So there is the sands of an Australian beach just North of Sydney, I committed to doing a better job of accepting aging as the result of a life well lived. Of being mortal...and the raw emotional gut punch that is to be human AND to be lucky enough to have reached middle age.
I am going to do my best to accept it, but I will tell you that I do not like it, so I suffer.
I don’t know where to go now. What will I keep doing and what will I release? I will keep working out, reading, writing, yogaing and walking. These things keep me better able to enjoy all this life I have...I will give myself some grace to have the feelings of really, really not wanting to be this old. Of all the things that are no longer an option for me. I will give myself some time and peace to sort out all the very complicated and hard feelings I have about growing older, all while being so grateful I am still here at all. So many people do not make it to 55. And it makes me feel like kind of a shit to bemoan that I made it here at all.
I walked back the beach and attempted to love myself just as I was. Pale, sagging and so much less than I wanted to be. And I just allowed all the denigration to come and be there and walk along side me. At one point, we even started holding hands. And I realized this critical self suffers too. So afraid and alone, so caught up in all the self analyzing and talk, that she misses the point so very often.
I waded around in the ocean, walking through tidal pools and watched the precarious balance of living and dying all around me. I saw the tiny snails, mollusks, sea urchins, barnacles and anemones hold onto this very precious gift of life. And in their steadfast dedication to just surviving another day, I decided to join them, in allowing all this self talk to just shut the fuck up. I sat down on a rock, felt the hardness of it on my backside, felt the rush of the ocean water flow over my feet. Watched the waves crash in the distance with a violence that screamed, “PAY ATTENTION, YOU ARE NOT PROMISED ANOTHER DAY OR MOMENT!”
I am not sure how long I sat there...but I can tell you that on my way home, I held that critical, scared girl’s hand and we climb the steep incline back the road. We rejoiced in how our muscles worked, and the soreness apparent from the day before’s climb out.
I am not sure how it happened, I just know that I dropped more deeply into my life, my body and allowed my mind to become untethered from all the bullshit I keep manufacturing to distract me from the joys as well as the pains of living.
I climbed into bed last night, content, happy even, I rubbed my belly and did my best to love it after a lifetime of intense hatred. I realized that a flat stomach will not save me...it just means that I will die with a flatter stomach and no one will give two fucks about that...but there are some people, some very amazing people, who would grieve the loss of me, as a person, and wouldn’t ever think one second about my untoned abs, my lack of tan or my sagging skin...
So why the fuck should I?
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