Why, At Almost 70, I Am Redefining Beauty
By: Julia E Hubbel
Tags: Women, Aging Well, Aging, Feminism, Life

Why, At Almost 70, I Am Redefining Beauty

On letting go of the past, and embracing what’s coming

What do you and I do, particularly as women, as the Goddess begins to work Her magic on our faces, our bodies and our beings as we age?

What do you and I do, as women, when we are forced to face the inevitability of our Becoming? As we must let go of what defined us as girls, as mothers, as creatures of desire?

What happens?

I can’t speak for anyone else. I’ve never been a great beauty. Never was. Once in my long life, when I was in my early thirties, I got that kind of attention. I’d starved myself stick thin. I had on a white silk dress with red dots, which was being played around my body by the breeze whipping around the buildings in Washington DC. I got a wolf whistle.

I’m not that girl any more.

Never will be again.

Some would say that I was in my prime back then.

I wouldn’t. Not with the sexual assaults, the rapes, the eating disorders, the terrible psychic pain. Prime? Please. Just….please.

My prime is just beginning.

Perhaps what is most important about barking at 70, just a few years away, is that the girl who still lives inside me, for she does, who used to cry out for that kind of acknowledgement, has finally just sat down.

She had her time in the sun.

Another, deeper part of me is just beginning to stand up.

You and I, especially at this age, are the sum of all the women* we have been, the personalities and roles we have inhabited, the personas and masks we wore. We are, at this age, able to dip a brush into any of the pots of our previous lives and, from them, begin to to draw who we can become.

This is how the Goddess paints us.

She can do little if we are forever staring into the vessel that contained us in our youth, our gazes full of woe, loss, and longing and false memories of a “better time.” How quickly we forget our youthful angst, our terror about aging, the night sweats about the wrinkles. The fear that we’d lose our value as we age.

We lose our value when we mourn our youth, and fail to step into the promise of our legacy.

Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash

The Goddess offers a partnership.

My job is to keep the body, mind and spirit strong and limber.

And to stay open.

The Goddess would like to deliver gifts. Among them: light, in the heart, in the soul, and a lighter burden as we shed what no longer matters.

The Goddess’ greatest gift: humor. For as we do indeed face that good night, the gentility and grace that come with our ability to laugh is our greatest guarantee that you and I will live well, for however long we have left.

As we age into ourselves, our promise, it’s available to let go of all the attachments and identifications with our bodies, the currency of youth or beauty or both. Some of us age very well, and continue to be stunning well into their eighties and beyond. Externally, at least.

For my part, whether or not I continue to sport physical beauty is nowhere near as important as whether I have the courage to let life carve itself into my face.

Whether I can continue to rise, then stand, then revel in what my final years offer me. The chance to know freedom. The potential to grow wisdom. To continue to dip into those paint pots and create the masterpiece that is whatever legacy I might leave.

I have no idea what that might be. I do know, and strongly believe, that once we pass sixty, the last decades our lives might best be spent not only in gratitude for making it this far, but in giving back from the living bible of our own experiences.

Those parts of me that no longer serve, I have sat them down.

For I must, or else be slave to the demands of those lesser parts of me that clamor for my attention, at at time when I have limited time and attention to give.

As women, as Women of Age, the opportunity is to blaze our own trail through the aging process.

Nobody can possibly do what you can do in the world. You and I have gifts. Those gifts, left unexpressed, rob the larger world of your footprints. For many of us, the path ahead is long and wide and inviting.

The question is whether we will spend the years that the Goddess is weaving silver into our hair aching for youth and beauty or a long-lost waistline, identifying with what is no longer. And in some cases, never was.

Or, you and I can be painted by a loving Goddess, in all the colors of our exquisite potential, unleashed when we release our youth.

How will the world feel your footprints?

The sands of Mafia Island, Tanzania Julia Hubbel

*This is of course as true for men as for women, but I’m talking to the ladies at the moment.