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| Category: Anti Aging |
Date published: January 24, 2005 |
I sometimes ask myself, "When exactly did it happen?" In reality, I know it began the day I was born. From that day forward, I began this aging process...and thusly, my journey toward the end of life.
Back in my youth, the door to the cage lied opened. I didn't feel the confinement of its walls. I frolicked in the field of clover with pastures broad and green, the future was mine.
The day I first began to notice the bars closing around me was the day I turned thirty. For some, it's forty and others fifty, for me it was thirty. I always wanted to be a nurse. As a teen, I read stories of Florence Nightingale and loved the idea of being an angel of mercy. At thirty, other than dead end jobs, motherhood and the role of a wife, I felt I accomplished nothing in my life. I hadn't fulfilled the dreams of my youth.
As I look back, I realize I was wrong. A career as a wife and mother may be the noblest of them all...and one of the hardest. For me, it was raising five children and taking care of countless of others to help my husband with the household expenses, but I wasn't a nurse.
Today, even though I know this, I feel the cage closing in ever tighter and don't see the door opened anymore. I'm growing old. I see my mother and remember when she was my age, those years between then and now passed quickly...too quickly. I see myself now as her...and can feel the speed of the train.
I once knew a woman who was a patient of the doctor I worked for, she rejoiced with each birthday that came and went...it meant she was still alive. I felt ashamed when I looked at my own grumbling, but I didn't change my attitude and still haven't. Aging isn't something I accept readily. Each birthday sees the bars to the cage tighten more and more and I find it hard to find the door of escape. Will it be death that sets me free...that places me back onto those fields of clover with pastures broad and green? The woman I mentioned above is now dead. She walks in those green pastures... The thing is, she never really left them. She rejoiced and thanked God for each new day God gave her here on earth. As a result, she felt the green moss beneath her feet...instead of like me... feeling the stones.
I wrote the following poem sometime back on this very subject.
THE AGING CAGE
What's in a year that I should fear The turning of the page, And truth I see within the mirror That daily see me age?
Where's the place to find inside, To accept the changing years, And instead of run and hide, To rejoice as each appears?
How do I dance on golden floors And ignore the creaks I hear? Where do I find those open doors To the passing years I fear?
When ere I see tomorrow's fate, I see the coming of the grave, Before my eyes, is seen too late, The fear of age that kept me slave.
Let me see each turning page, As indeed the golden age, That I welcome without rage... As I break this aging cage.
The last line in my poem, I want to do it... I want to break this aging cage. I want to feel young again, even if only in mind. I cover the gray and pretend that beneath the dye they aren't there, that they don't exist. I find I'm my own worst enemy, others don't see me the way I see myself...old. Age is a number that varies from person to person. Some of the youngest people I know are much older than I am in chronological age. The women continue to dance and wear high heels and some even date men. Imagine dating at eighty. The men still think themselves as dashing, it matters not that their hair is gray and the eyesight has diminished. For them, the door to the aging cage never closed. They come and go as they please, they know they're winter, but feel like spring. Their minds remain young and they continue to feel the clover beneath their feet.
March will give to me another birthday. I will double the age in which I first felt the doors to the cage close. I think I'm still in autumn, but winter quickly approaches. I feel the winter snows in my psychic, but will attempt to break it open, these doors that enclose around me. I'll try to welcome in the golden age...and will try to do it without rage.
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