You may have grown up at a time when being young meant being beautiful. A time in the world when only performance and energy symbolically associated with youth mattered. Where magazines aimed at 40-year-olds used 14-15 year old models to talk about "anti-wrinkle" creams. Having wrinkles was a sign of disgrace, against which one had to fight at all costs.
I grew up in that period.
When I turned 15, something changed in my perception of the world, the one induced by an environment that I was not even aware of.
I was on holiday, in a house among the pines, by the sea. I had signed up for a morning tai chi class, given outdoors by a woman who immediately moved me. She was ageless, with beautiful long white hair. She was calm and her face always had a benevolent smile, a serenity that did not fit at all with the image that society wanted to give me. Her wrinkles told me a story, which I understand today: the story of resilience in the face of hardship, of the inner smile that can be opposed to the events of life, as long as we cultivate this joy, this unalterable base anchored in each of us.
This woman, even today, I think of her when I look in the mirror. I say to myself that if I can no longer regulate everything with the candour of my face, it shows the progress made towards the wisdom of experience and this fills me with joy.
The signs of age are then no longer signs of weakness, but testimonies of a strength of life, of a beauty that one is just beginning to discover.
