Obsession...

- Young at heart. Slightly older in other places -

The lines are deep ridges making their way across his forehead, the laughter has made its cheerful highlights on the corners of his eyes, the worries that never turned to problems but nevertheless made their marks, the skin that creases when he grins and his blue eyes extend their smile and love to me...

The face that is perfect - just the way it is!

A bit of healthy obsession with the ones we love and care about, the people we dream of sharing our years with through aeons plus this life time.

I guess it is just my way of seeing - no one is perfect, yet everyone is perfectly perfect in exactly that moment in time and space that is now.

However!

People are SO obsessed with youth - when did that happen? Was it when images started being air brushed and we turned to technology to wipe the blemishes away? When news became readily available at our fingertips and we discovered how we 'are supposed to look'? Digital remastering of our own photos taking years off our naturally aging beauty?

Or perhaps it has always been that way because of the general concern with being replaced - whether it is by  our partner or our workplace replacing us with cheaper workforce with fewer years of experience, or just competing for the attention of our peers... Trying to keep control of something that has its own way, time.

Maybe just a natural sociological phenomenon that exists in all species - or are we the only species that has others dictating what is attractive, brain washing us into thinking age is unattractive or whatever the standardised 'belle du jour' tells us is beautiful as the 'truth'?

Youth - the time challenge which will never grow old!

But our friends know us! and there really is no need to hide because our friends and family are there no matter what signs the years caress our bodies with.

The sentence 'if I knew what I know today when I was 20 years old...', then we could have been wise and young? Well, there is probably a good reason it was not so. One reason being that life experience comes with the years and if we know it all consciously at a young age what trouble would we then avoid getting into? Trouble,  which at the time we are 20 is great fun getting in and out of! What a waste of years of learning - that would truly be missing out on building our character, turning us into arrogant know-it-alls at 20 instead of 40.

And no matter how wise and knowing the years have made me and how many wrinkles and laughter lines it has added to my face, a balloon still pops when you poke it with a pointy object making it burst with a loud sound that still makes me jump and all my wrinkles jump with me!

Another fact of life along with growing older!

Long live the years we learn and grow, the love we feel in our hearts and souls, and the wrinkles the lessons leave on our faces!