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In high school we had a teacher who appraised the teenagers before him, then sneered: “When you leave school, you girls will all get fat.”
He was wrong, of course. What he should have said is that you will eventually stop growing and yet you will keep changing and morphing throughout your entire life; that things that are easy now will one day be difficult. Also, you’ll likely never need this trigonometry, but you will need these friends.
I recall this now as my Big Birthday looms in 18 days, as I’m mid-way through a new healthy-eating regime, because these breakthrough birthdays – 50, alright? I’ll be 50! – are milestones and we want to hit them looking and feeling our very best.
I know intellectually as we age our metabolisms slow down, but I also feel it on cellular level as I struggle to shed the ballast. I’ve lost 3kg; I’ve got 3kg to go before the big day.
I saw a friend on Saturday. She’d been on the cabbage soup diet for three weeks, she told me.
She’d lost 3kg too, but she was furious. She had expected to lose at least double that after starving herself; ten years ago she’d have lost double that.
Isn’t it funny, I said, although not amusing at all, how our bodies rebel, how they change, how they… age?
When I was young, I’d see people’s bingo wings and paunches and assume they’d let themselves go. Now I know life cuts us all down to size, and sometimes that size is bigger than we’d like.
Our minds change too. Despite our best efforts, life doesn’t often pan out as we imagined, and other people mould our hearts and shape our souls, and our bodies are simply our trusty vehicles which need more maintenance as we grow older.
And I recall that long-ago teacher and wish he’d been less fatuous. So I think instead of another teacher, Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who wrote a poem for graduating students. One verse resonates:
Everything flows, an old Greek said.
Nothing’s secure. Gold’s only lead
When you stop to think.
On your way up, show consideration
To the ones you meet on their way down.
The Latin root of condescension
Means we all sink.
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