Skin Deep

A friend shared this beautiful article. It’s about responding to the ways our bodies change over the years. Here’s an excerpt:

We journey from a seed in our mother’s womb until we are planted in the grave with ever-changing bodies. Time scratches out its passage across my looks and the looks of all those I love. All our lives, our bodies manifest evidence of an existence marked by gains and losses. We gain and lose pounds, muscle, bruises, teeth, and hair. We lose elasticity and gain wrinkles. We gain scars. Our bodies process and carry our experiences, not without complaint, but with an unfailing perseverance that is worthy of both gratitude and honor. And one of the very great privileges of this life is to cherish the bodies of those I love through all their gains and losses for as long as I get to have them. We do not get to have those we love forever.  In that final losing, every turn of the head and expression of the face becomes poignantly precious.  So, may I have eyes to see them now.

It stirs me the same way Barbara Brown Taylor’s essay “The Practice of Wearing Skin” did. And again I realize that this process of choosing to live within my own skin with gratitude and respect is a continual discipline. What I love about the excerpt above is its successful effort to find a definition of beauty that encompasses all the potential stories a body can tell. Skin deep, it turns out, is pretty deep.

I’ve gained some weight this winter. And I’m completely ambivalent about it. Of course I like how I look better when I’m thinner. But part of the reason I’m in this fix is that I’ve given up running once and for all. It just kills my joints, my feet, my back. I love the effects, and there’s no exercise I like better for ease of implementation: you don’t need special equipment and you don’t need the monotony of an exercise video every day. You just go out the door and run, looking around at the morning beauty, thinking or praying whatever you want. But it injures my basic structure even as it keeps the fat off. I like that my priority is on health in a larger sense, and I like that I don’t move like an arthritic person 40 years my senior these days.

Another reason I’ve gained weight, I’m convinced, is that I’ve been cold all winter. I’ve spent many hours standing outside while my daughter does horse stuff. My toes turn to ice, the slabs of muscle on my legs shiver and quiver, and my fingers stiffen. I come in and it takes me forever to get warm again, and I know I eat more in an unconscious effort to stoke the furnace. But it’s worth it. She’s getting experiences she’s never had, and I enjoy seeing it and supporting it.

At a very deep level, I don’t care like I used to about my appearance. I don’t want to “let myself go” entirely. But it has always been a bit of a struggle for me to find and maintain the right order of priorities in the area of diet and appearance. The times I’ve been happiest about how I look have without fail been the times when I am overdoing it and harming my body in some way. Sometimes the real measure of health is not the visible result but the internal balance.

In any case, the article linked to above is a beautiful recognition of the body as a text — a ruthlessly honest diary of lived experience. Our culture takes a very superficial reading of bodies, as it takes a very superficial reading of many other things. But like most stories bodies testify to layers of meaning, and to multiple themes. Some of the stories leave visible traces, others don’t, but learning to live within our present bodies has a way of redeeming past attitudes. As the writer so compellingly demonstrates, it redeems our ability to treasure and remember others, too.

Like the writer of that post, I think of my children. My 9-year-old often comes into the bathroom while I’m drying my hair, ostensibly to ask me a question, but invariably ending up with her arms tightly squeezed around my middle. She leans her head in under my arm, smiles, closes her eyes, and inhales deeply. It’s a picture of the response I’m working toward — the response I’ve been working toward for many years now, and haven’t quite reached yet, but want to. It will be the beginning of a new kind of love for the world when I do. And it will be one of the best gifts I can give my daughters.