A few days ago, my husband and I were out on our usual nighttime stroll, when, after several minutes of companionable silence, I told him how happy he has made me in the six years of our marriage.
Perhaps the happiest I have ever been in my 30+ years.
It was then I realised our six years of togetherness feel like a decade, perhaps more. And I started wondering how life would change, how we would grow, individually and together, in the years to come.
The next day, on our morning walk, I saw an old woman in the park. Having gathered a handful of kids, she was leading the bunch through an impromptu Yoga session. I don’t know if it was an official yoga class (this was the first time we had seen this group there), or if the woman was the kids’ granny or guardian.
I felt such a wave of serenity descend on me, watching her carry on her session through the children’s laughter and strangers’ stares. Nothing fazed her. And I longed for her contentment. A contentment not with life and its trappings, but with oneself; the kind that comes only after you have lived in your skin for a lifetime, and found it, to your own pleasant surprise, to be far more comfortable than you ever gave it credit for.
As we stand at the precipice of another turn of the calendar; adding another year to our already limited time on this beautiful planet, I realise that it’s a new feeling, this tentative camaraderie with aging. I remember being terrified of it; utterly incapacitated by the mere thought of being at the fag end of life.
No, not death. Never Death. The truth of my mortality has never had a very great hold on me. It was always growing ever older that loomed over me like the shadow of some dense, irrefutable premonition. Even in that, it was the squeeze of loneliness that overpowered any rational thought as I pondered over an uncertain, unhappy future.
Why was I so certain that the future held only unhappiness? Because that was what I had ever seen; my past and my present was drenched in an oily, unbreathable slick of profound despair. Don’t we gravitate towards what’s familiar? The sorrow, not mine yet mine, was a familiar blanket to hide myself under against the cold, sharp, brutal ambiguity of the unknown.
So, when I met my husband and we rose in love and later got married, it took me several years to let go of my blanket of darkness. Not because I wanted it that badly, but because I was terrified of this new, unprecedented light that seemed to have just waltzed in my life along with my husband.
Now, six years later, the misery blanket is a bittersweet remnant of the architecture of my past. A castle of gloom and overcast skies and perpetual rain and cold feet and cold hands and a colder heart; the walls of which are slowly breaking apart into smithereens.
I read somewhere recently that premature greying could be a result of trauma experienced in early life. I look at my silver in the mirror. A treasure that has hoarded me since I was barely in my teens. I remember the myriad tips and tricks I adopted to get rid of them, to hide them away, to transform them; failed attempts at regaining all that colour, reclaiming a past long since lost to fight or flight.
I don’t know how true or how scientific it is, but after months of deciding to own my greys, I now look in the mirror and feel oddly proud of my silver crown.
Last night, I squealed in delight as I showed a pigment-less streak at my temples to my husband. “Look!” I said. “How gorgeous is this?”
Because it is gorgeous; more, it is resplendent.
This novel fascination with growing older, perhaps it’s the enchantment of silver hair, not as a sign of age but as a crown of stories waiting to be shared. It’s the dream of being the keeper of an attic filled with memories, where each dusty box contains a treasure trove of adventures, heartbreaks, and laughter that echoes through my years.
It’s not a desire to fast forward through the days, but a peculiar yearning for the kind of old that whispers tales of timeless wisdom, seasoned laughter, and the art of sipping tea or, I should say Coffee now, without a care in the world.
There was a time I was what we call a Chaivinist — a lover of tea, but that, too, has changed in the light of these brilliant days.
It’s not about the aches and pains; it’s about the allure of having a lifetime of stories etched into the lines of my face.
Stories that would wipe out, or perhaps, overwrite the lines carved by my past. A veritable paradise of new memories, new experiences and anecdotes that would burrow into and fill out the crevasses left behind by childhood trauma, depression and a lifetime of darkness. The rutted stains of tears bejewelled by the repository of life truly lived; not merely survived.
What need, then, of the myriad masks we have created to conceal ourselves? What need of filters and Photoshop and air-brushing away all that makes us who we really are?
But why this whimsy, you might ask? In a world fixated on youthfulness and the cult of perpetual vitality, this longing to be old is a one-woman rebellion against my fear of aging. It’s an invitation to redefine the narrative, to see wrinkles not as battle scars but as a roadmap of a life well-lived.
Consider, then, the allure of nostalgia, not as a trap that binds you to the past, but as a cosy quilt that warms the soul.
This longing to be old is a desire to witness the world with the kind of seasoned eyes that see beyond the surface, recognising the beauty in both the chaos and the calm. A fervent hope that one day, I would get to show off my wrinkles and greys and all the lovely sags of my skin and claim them as indisputable evidence of a happy life; not one filled with strife and violence.
For in my longing to be old, I have realised a profound truth — that age is not the enemy but an accomplice in the grand adventure of life. And that one day I would be like that old woman I saw in the park. Brimming with the joy of having lived a full life, unafraid, loved and having loved another with all of my heart.
There are legends upon legends of a mythical fountain of eternal youth. Theys say that drinking or bathing in its waters restores youth. Ever stopped to wonder, what if it is not a rejuvenation of our years, but of our minds? And if that’s the case, what is stopping us from awakening to our true beauty, our everlasting youthfulness and vitality, right here, right now?
This has been my learning from the year that has gone by. For me, the realisation that life is not a race against time, but a dance with it, has been years in coming. It doesn’t have to be for you.
Dodinsky, the celebrated author of ‘The Garden of Thoughts’, once said, “Growing old with someone else is beautiful, but growing old while being true to yourself is divine.”
In the coming year, let’s give ourselves the freedom, the benediction of experiencing this divinity.
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