“What happened to you?”
Several months ago, a friend flipped through a small photo album that I keep on my ottoman. It is a collection of 5×7-inch family photos – “keepers” from when the kids (and their parents and grandparents) were young. As he snapped it shut, he looked across the room at me and, with a laugh, said, “What happened to you?!”
I’ll confess that his joke (for I trust that that is what it was meant to be) stung. I think I muttered something along the lines of, “Well life’s been a lot lately. I guess it shows,” before changing the subject to something less tender.
I’ll also confess that the sting has lasted. I still find myself looking in the mirror more closely and more critically than I usually do. And I see what I think he saw as he looked at my younger image and then at me – a woman who has aged noticeably in the last several years. This is not surprising because (drum roll, please) I have. I am no longer in my thirties. Instead I am closer to 60 than I am to 50. And the last few years of life have been a lot. But even if they’d been a proverbial walk in the park, the years would still have changed my face because that is simply what happens to us humans lucky enough to get older.
Like the Velveteen Rabbit, I got “real”
The other day, I was reminded of the book The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. Do you remember it? When I read it as a young girl, I don’t think I really understood it. In fact, I thought it was sad. But now, especially in the light of my friend’s question, I think it’s beautiful.
In it, a little toy, velveteen rabbit desperately wants to be “real.” “Real” for the velveteen rabbit is another way of describing the love he feels for the little boy who chooses to love him and to share his adventures with him. And being “real” leaves a mark.
His only friend in the toy box, a wise, old Skin Horse (even today I don’t like to think too hard about what this name means) explains,
“Generally, by the time you’re real, most of your hair has been loved off. And your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are real, you can’t be ugly – except to people who don’t understand.”
This wise, old toy horse‘s message holds true for each of us. A message that, speaking personally, transforms what I see when I pause to look at my reflection in the mirror. A message I wish I’d been able to share with my friend in answer to his question.
Living and loving leave marks
What happened to me? Love happened to me. The “easy” kind of love and also the kind where you get fully vulnerable even when you know the end is going to hurt. What happened to me? Life happened to me. A life filled with adventures, struggles, joys, some fear, some worry, and a whole lot of curiosity. What happened to me? I got “real.”
And I hope and pray that this is the same thing that keeps happening to me – and to each of you, too. I hope you and I continue to love and to be loved so much that our hair is “loved off,” and our eyes drop out and we get loose in our joints, and we get very, very shabby. Because this will mean that we are “real” and that is the only thing that will matter in the end.
A New Year’s Hope
While I’d say that this is the only thing I want as our calendar pages flip to a brand-new year, that would not be the complete truth. What I really want is the counter-cultural clarity to see my “realness” when I look in the mirror and to rejoice in it. I want this for each of you, too. This will be my prayer as, day by day, you and I try to live and love the way that the velveteen rabbit did with his little boy.
Patanjali teaches that abhinivesa (clinging to life or fear of change) is the final obstacle for most of us in our search for freedom from suffering. We glimpse the truth of this in the multi-billion-dollar industry of “anti-aging products.” What if we could remember that signs of aging are reflections of lives well-lived and hearts that have loved well? Could this free us from the anxious desire – created by the youth-obsessed commercial world we live in – to look decades younger than we are?