GROWING OLD AND FEELING YOUNG

When I look into a mirror these days…my old face is what I see… and many is the day I wonder…how this came to be. As I look a little closer…I touch my face and say, “Where did all these wrinkles come from…and what’s with all this gray?” For me…what makes this seem so unbelievable, so dreamlike…so unreal is the me I see in the mirror often looks so much older than I feel. Which leads me to wonder… every time I see that old man’s face staring back at me if our bodies on the outside and how we feel on the inside…grow old differently. What if our old age shows up on the outside… hence the color gray and the wrinkles on our skin… but what if our youth…protected by our body…ages more slowly…from within. What if we’re more like a book and our body is the cover… a cover that as we age has weathering we can’t hide… but what if our cover is there to protect and preserve our youthfulness and our story that’s inside? What if, understanding this, as we age… we open our cover a little more slowly…gently…with great care… knowing memories of when we were younger…are waiting for us there. And for a while as we visit the memories we find inside the pages of our book For a moment as if by magic…we are younger than we look. Which is why most times when I pass a mirror today and see that old man with all those wrinkles on my skin… I open the weathered cover of my book…to find the younger man within.