NOTICED:AGING LIKE A FINE CHEESE
This year, on my birthday, I resolved to do something radical (it happens to fall on the vernal equinox, so I tend to celebrate it as if it were New Year’s). No, it wasn’t a “big” or important birthday, just another cheery turnstile on the road to senility, decrepitude and death. And no, I didn’t jump out of a plane, climb a distant mountain peak at dawn or book an appointment to have my eyes, tits or ass tucked, and/or drained and lifted. And I most certainly did not hold a fashionable “rebranding” party for myself, where, apparently, one invites all their friends over, serves them cocktails and hors d’oeuvres and then has to listen their “constructive” advice as to how and what one should really work on in order to become more marketable or more appealing to the outside world.
What I decided was not to do any of those things. And by not doing them, not get any older. Let me explain.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having lunch at a bustling restaurant overlooking the Pacific in Santa Monica, California. Hands down, the coolest person in the room full of perfect, pretty people was a guy who must have been in his late 60s. He had long, flowing grey hair and a full beard and he was wearing a turquoise caftan, an armful of interesting bracelets and something woven and leathery around his neck. Yes, he was an old hippie. It was clear that he had been dressed like that, oblivious to sidelong glances or whether his look was particularly fashionable, for years. He was also deep in animated conversation with his friend, as they shared a bottle of wine at noon. But what really impressed me about this guy was that unlike seemingly everybody else of his generation, he didn’t seem to feel the need to change himself in middle age. Simply by staying the course, sticking with who he was, his freak flag flying high, it was as if he hadn’t actually got any older. In a weird way, he was even younger than everybody else, because he still held the conviction of his youth. As much as he had aged, it certainly wasn’t in the form of the typical, self-loathing, regretful North American midlifer, but more like a wonderfully ripe, stinky old cheese.
Right now, everywhere you look, self-transformation is the name of the game. No matter who you are and what you really care about, just being yourself isn’t trying hard enough. Smart women who never banked on their looks to get them to the top of the heap have whitened their teeth, liposuctioned their thighs and enlarged their breasts to look like CEO Barbie. Lifelong gym failures, the last chosen for every school team, have hired personal trainers at 50 to punish their aging bodies into rippling replicas from the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. Wry, self-deprecating forty-somethings are in cognitive therapy to learn how to stop being so damn wry and self-deprecating. If they aren’t busy re-inventing themselves by ending their marriages, they are staving off the depressing inevitability of it all by having an affair.
Television and popular culture, naturally, are onto our fear and yearning with their transformative reality shows, where people who never danced before learn to samba, lousy dressers become fashion plates and people who undressed in the dark learn to love their naked bodies. In this world where it’s never too late to be a “better you”, we can’t seem to get enough of self-help gurus like Oprah and her little buddy Eckhart Tolle, and their memoirs of self-realisation that document and celebrate “the process” and “the journey”. So much so that shedding the tiresome, not to mention wrinkling, selves we have been inhabiting for years with all their scars and embarrassing bruises for fresher unscathed versions isn’t only a mass preoccupation but a new, tortured and relentless form of gravity-defying entertainment .
True, they do call mid-life for women “the change”, but does it all have to be so literal?
It seems the best old people, like the late Georgia O’Keefe , sculptor Louise Nevelson, or late-in-life actresses Lynn Redgrave and Joanne Woodward, or perhaps extreme fashion icon Iris Barrel Apfel, exude the kind of powerful charisma that can only come about through a gradual ripening in the light of their own self-acceptance. Besides, what could be more youthful than insisting unto the death on your way or the highway? Thanks to my hippie friend, I’m beginning to wonder whether nothing is so aging as accepting the idea that self-transformation is necessary—let alone whether it could somehow prevent it.
If I have learned anything over these birthdays, it is that much like fashion, life is perverse. Which is why I’ve decided that the one thing I’m going to try harder at as I grow older is to be more of myself, rather than somebody better. Change, after all, is inevitable. But becoming your very essence, aging like a fine wine or stinky cheese—now that’s an art form.