The Maverick Bluestocking on Anti-Ageing

This is my own topic today – one I’ve been pondering again for the last day or so.

In 2012, I spent the whole year celebrating my 50th birthday by doing 50 exciting, new and challenging things throughout the 12 months. The whole experience was life changing and I am still processing what it has really meant to me. One of the many gifts I received as a result was the opportunity to question what ageing means to us, especially to modern women.

I developed an aversion to anything that promised to be ‘anti-ageing.’ For a long time I wasn’t sure why. Then I decided that the whole idea of anti-ageing (also known as ‘time delay,’ ‘lasting youth,’ etc) assumes a prejudice against older women. There is no doubt that we live in a culture that reveres youth and that there is still a problem with women over a certain age (30, 40, 50…depends on the context) becoming invisible and missing out on opportunities.

Just recently, however, I have dropped into a new, deeper understanding of my aversion to the anti-ageing message. When we take time to contemplate, we realise that life is all about movement. We may (and I do) say over and over how important it is to live in the now, the ‘moment,’ but in fact the now is not a static place but something a bit more like a seat on a rollercoaster. We are hurtling through time, into a totally unknown and unknowable future. However much we may try to control what happens in the next minute, the next six months or the next 10 years, however much we plan and intend and imagine, the future remains unknown and uncertain. All we can be certain of is that, while life continues, movement, relentless hurtling, is the nature of existence.

What’s more, as women, we are part of the creation of that movement. Life flows through us, both literally and figuratively. We transform from child to maiden to mother to crone, whether or not we become mothers and grandmothers. Our nature is constant flow and transformation. We change because we are alive. The only way to stop changing, to stop the flow, is to stop existing.

But if we buy into anti-ageing, isn’t that what we are trying to do? I am not talking about wanting to look beautiful and be healthy; I mean the compulsion to freeze ourselves at a certain perfect age, to stop time, to halt the natural process of ageing. Most of us, as individuals, are far too sensible to believe that freezing ourselves as a timeless image is either possible or desirable, but we are still subjected to the sales pitches on a daily basis. We can’t stop them but we can point at them and be aware of what is being implied.

And once we have done that, once we’ve agreed that interfering with the natural flow and movement of life is not only impossible but also disconnects us from our true and wonderful nature, let’s embrace the flow. I’m not suggesting we ‘let ourselves go.’ I just think we could sit with the idea that we are at the centre of life’s juiciness. We are not just sitting in the rollercoaster, powerless to change the speed or direction; we are the energy and creative power that runs the rollercoaster.

The movement, progression and transformation that you can witness throughout any woman’s life illustrate the incredible power that she personifies. It may be scary, and sometimes uncomfortable, but for sure it’s thrilling and exciting. Who wants to exchange that for a false promise in a fancy pot?