Beauty Transformed - Ageing, between the lenses of love and judgement.

Why is it, when we see the ruins of a great castle, the knarl of an ancient olive tree or the oldest grave in the cemetery, we become so awestruck and admiring? We are so absolutely enchanted by the sheer age of things. We respect them. We willingly keep off the grass of history. We admire the flaws and crumbling imperfections. We feel a loving and protective instinct, despite no sense of personal ownership. It runs deep in us and we feel proud to be a product of our creative, industrious ancestry.

And then we see ourselves in the mirror, or in a photo. A selfie that just knocks us off the shelfie. We see the palour and the winkles, the grey that marks a change of seasons and of years, and we are filled with a heavy fatigue that passes no understanding. We see age as a failing - not the end of a beginning, but the beginning of an end. We recoil. We are sad.

We all have an inner "ageist" - that deep part of ourselves that is convinced that getting older walks hand-in-hand with being unattractive, worthless and irrelevant. It is a cruel learned behaviour, and a mean off-shoot of our egos. Despite the commonality for us all, we collectively see the ageing process as a battle - implying the ridiculous notion that some kind of victory is possible - an inevitability that we are prepared to wage war against, armed to the teeth with creams and dyes and thoughts of random, elective procedures.

This inner critic - the ghost of who we were - is there not just at the autumn of our years, but in every transition, from forty being the new thirty, through the self-forgiveness of mid life crises, the ageist within, chimes in. But can we catch it? Can we sense when that judgement comes, around the stumble or stoop of another, or our own sudden shortness of breath? What do we say inwards? How do we talk to ourselves more kindly and with compassion not based on self-sympathy, but on celebration?

If our identity becomes rooted in how we look, or worse - how we think others see us - then we will be reduced to a single, meaningless value. If, on the other hand, we look at these age-related inevitabilities with the pride around which we view stamps in our passports or how our kids have turned out. The books we have read and the jam jars we have filled.

In our efforts to be "enough" to our own inner critic or to perform, please and perfect for the satisfaction of others, we can get stuck in quite damaging cylces - identifying our perceived shortcomings and trying to hide them from view - itself a wholly unreasonable expectation on every level. We seek out imperfections in others so we can compare oursleves to them, so we can feel the safe and familiar sanctuary of "less than".

We can draw this conclusion: that this way of living is just a form of self-sabotage. It is the courage of connecting to the "processes" of ageing and the lives we have lived that is surely the secret of wholehearted living.