Marion Freijsen A blog about Sports, Fitness & Health

Age

Bet this title got your attention!
Age seems to be the new mass obsession. We have had smoking, and banned it – drinking, banned that too – coffee, diminished our intake but what to do about Aging? We seem to want to control everything these days, we seem to want to be healthy and look young until we are about to step into our coffins…but aren’t we hitting the wrong nail on the head here?

All I see when I turn on the TV in the US is adverts for all sorts of creepy new procedures, usually involving long needles, weird toxic materials and smooth skinned, over-tanned and expressionless looking doctors. I think that for the next SciFi movie about aliens taking over the planet – they should take these doctors as the model for the aliens – after a while, they and their patients all look the same with a tight, hollow eyed and humorless face. Maybe our future is not threatened by aliens from outer-space but simply by those living on our planet amongst us now.

I don’t get this obsession with getting older. Of course I hated the morning I looked at my legs and noticed that my skin was no longer entirely firm, even though my muscles are strong and sculpted… and I am not shouting for joy every time I spot a new wrinkle in the mirror. Well, a wrinkle in my face looking in the mirror that is (btw remind me never to use those enlarging mirrors ever again, that is really scary). But at the same time, I am more intrigued by the aging process then I am scared. Isn’t it amazing to see your body cope with the new hormone levels, find new ways to combat the little troubles aging throws at you. I find it incredible to see that some little habit I picked up when I was 20, has been working its way through over the years to become a real issue now just so that I can spend the next 20 years on getting rid of it again. It’s like one of those small trickles of water high up the mountain that eventually becomes a massive river flowing into the ocean. But even though it’s now a river instead of a trickle, it’s no less beautiful. It has a beauty all of its own and it becomes a challenge to then work with it and correct it’s path again…

I think as long as you are intrigued, aging is something of continued interest. It keeps you engaged with your own body – it keeps you in tune and actively working on making the most of what you have. And that to me is 1000x better then handing over the control over the appearance of my body to some Alien look-alike