Hi thereThis piece has been in my drafts folder for a while, and I was inspired to resurrect it this morning. I hope you like it.
I gasped, and looked again.
Peering into the mirror, I focused on my cheeks. What on earth were those lines? I walked away, only to come back a few minutes later to double check. How could this have happened overnight?
It really floored me, this first discovery of these wrinkles, a few years ago. It took several days of coming to terms with this evidence of ageing in progress to be able to look at my face in even a slightly different way.
Meantime I found a photo of myself smiling when I was in my twenties, and everything harsh within me softened.
The grooves now showing in my cheeks were there all along, whenever I smiled. But they disappeared every time I stopped smiling, and so I’d never noticed them before.
Understandably, those repeated smiles over the years had made an imprint in my cheeks when my face was in repose. Hence what is now called wrinkles.
Here it is:
Wise Rare Inspiring Nice Kind Loving Enthusiastic Smiling (of course!)
Wise - because a lot more wisdom has been growing over the years I have lived (and hopefully I can look forward to more of it too, yay!) I trust that as you’re a reader here your wisdom is also growing too :)
Rare – because in a world of 8 billion people there is no-one else exactly like me. Or like you. Isn’t that quite amazing, when you think about it? It means there’s genuinely no-one else to compare myself to. What a dose of freedom that is! Affirming my rarity gives me confidence, and a little shot of joy too, when I really let go into getting my uniqueness.
Inspiring – often I’ve been told I’m inspiring (and I did win the Association of Scottish Business Women’s award for Woman of Inspiration in 2023). But actually I think anyone who is living their life authentically in any way, with passion and love, is an inspiration.
Nice – OMG that is a wee word that doesn’t always have a very good reputation, does it! But I was described as being nice the other day when I took the 9-year-old daughter of a neighbour up the road to groom my friend’s pony. We both had fun (so did the pony, whose eyes were half shut in a kind of blissful state as we untangled, combed and brushed her).
Kind – my mum always used to describe my granny, her mum, as kind, and I used to think it was a bit of a boring word, I couldn’t conjure up any excitement from it. For a lot of my years, especially my twenties and thirties, I’ve been into excitement. But as I’ve got older, I’ve thought differently about this quality. We sure need more of it in this world, so if I can reframe my wrinkles as representing kindness then that’s okay by me. It also means that in a world that has more and more ageing people, kindness gets to grow too.
Loving – after my first husband died in 2011, I promised myself that if I ever got the chance of love with someone again, I’d do my best to keep my heart open and loving (something I realised I hadn’t been too good at first time round). Mind you, it took quite a while before I really opened my heart to even the idea of there being someone else in my life. Anyway, I did get that chance, and I’ve been practicing keeping an open heart. (See next week’s post for how I met my husband, it’s an unusual story). Ah, so maybe that’s why the wrinkles seem to have appeared overnight – they are expressions of love! Well, it’s a ‘nice’ way to think about them, anyway.
Enthusiastic – I’m up for that, I say enthusiastically! This morning I was bubbling over with it. One of my private clients had finally managed (with my help) to get her will done and signed, and the next stage of her end of life plan completed. After it had bothered her in the background for years, she’d finally engaged me, and in just a few months we got there. The relief on her face was so lovely to witness.
Smiling – the late Barry Long used to remind his followers to ‘turn the corners of their mouths up’. It’s quite extraordinary how such a very simple physical movement can change your feelings; it’s impossible to stay down for long when your mouth is curling upwards at the sides. I’m not going to be stopping smiling any time soon, so instead I’ll welcome even more wrinkles and this new definition.
I’m just off to the mirror now to take a wee peek at these lovely indicators of all these words, and choose to feel good about myself.
How about you?
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