By admin 
Something rather strange happens when we grow older.
The person in the mirror begins to change, while the one looking through the eyes doesn’t seem to age in quite the same way.
There are wrinkles where there used to be none. The body needs a little more maintenance. Gravity becomes increasingly confident. And sometimes you walk into a room only to discover that apparently you had an excellent reason for going there….which has mysteriously disappeared.
We call all this aging.
And because we have learned to value youth so highly, we often look at these changes as losses. We try to erase the lines, hide the grey, tighten what has loosened and persuade the mirror that nothing much has happened.
But what if there is another way of looking?
Growing older becomes gentler when we stop asking the body to remain what it once was. The body belongs to time. It changes, as everything within time changes. But does that necessarily mean that everything we are is growing old with it?
In a certain way…growing older makes this impossible to ignore.
And maybe that is not entirely bad news.
A wrinkle is evidence that something temporary has been happening here. A face has laughed, worried, loved, cried, travelled, waited, been disappointed, surprised and delighted. The body slowly becomes a kind of landscape shaped by weather.
But the deeper question is: has the awareness noticing all these changes grown old too?
When I was twenty, there was an I looking through these eyes. Decades later, the scenery has changed considerably, but that simple sense of being here is strangely familiar.
The photograph changes.
The frame changes.
The story changes.
Yet something quietly watches the whole parade go by.
I am convinced that what we truly are does not exist inside time at all…
We are not being carried toward an ending; we are experiencing something that has beginnings and endings while mistaking ourselves for the character inside it.
Perhaps that is why getting older can contain an unexpected beauty.
Slowly, life removes some of our illusions of permanence.
The body says: “don’t get too attached to me!”
Possessions say the same thing. Roles disappear. Children grow up. Plans change. People come and go.
Everything seems to whisper: This too is temporary.
We can hear that as a threat, or we can hear it as an invitation.
Because if everything I can lose is not ultimately what I am, perhaps aging is not only about losing. Perhaps it can also be about becoming lighter.
And perhaps one day we can look into an older face in the mirror and, instead of asking, What happened to me?, smile and think:
Ah yes… the costume is getting older..and then notice that the one quietly looking at it is still here. The wrinkles aren’t cracks in who we are….they’re little reminders that we were never the surface to begin with.
With love, light and gratitude,
Gonny