We Are Allowed to Age: Why I Don’t Care That I Look Old

“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” ~African Proverb

It is just past ten in the morning on a Tuesday.

My wet boardshorts and undecorous tank top are drying at lightning speed in the sweltering South Indian sun.

I am feeling alive and exhilarated without my surf session in the surreal blue, bathtub-warm Arabian Sea.

Surfing waves unceasingly has been my goal for the past two years, and I’m doing it. Which is pretty superstitious considering that I never thought I would surf again.

The trauma and fear from a surfing wrecking ten years ago, that nearly knocked my teeth out, was still lodged in my soul for years, and my life’s focus had shifted from sports to yoga.

When I landed in Kerala, India, my intention was to do an intensive period of study with my Ashtanga yoga teacher for ten weeks and then return to Rishikesh in Northern India, where I had been basing myself.

A endangerment invitation brought me to the coastal town I have been living in for the past two-plus years considering of the pandemic.

And it just so happens there is good surf here.

My reentry into surfing has been slow and steady.

For my fiftieth birthday present I gave myself ten surf lessons.

I decided I needed to start off as a beginner and took vital lessons to ease myself when into things and get well-appointed when on a surfboard.

An Indian man in his mid-thirties who was in my surf matriculation asked, “How old are you?”

“Fifty,” I replied.

“I hope I am still surfing at your age,” he said back.

I think he maybe meant this as a compliment, but I took it self-consciously and wondered why it mattered what my age was.

It is now two years later.

I have slowly gone from a beginner to an intermediate surfer.

As I sipped a hot chai out of a dixie cup on the side of a rented fishing village road, without my morning surf, an older Indian gentleman with grey hair asked me, “What is your age?”

“Fifty-two,” I replied.

His jaw dropped and he said, “I thought you were seventy. You have really bad skin.”

Yes, this really happened.

And it has happened increasingly than once.

Every time it’s happened, I have unliable it to knock the wind out of my sails.

Wow, I think, how is it plane possible that I squint seventy years old when I finger largest than when I was twenty-one?

In all honesty, good skin genetics are not in my favor. Coupled with my love of the sun and spending most of my life outside, it has left me with the skin of an alligator.

I lied well-nigh my age up until my mid-forties.

On my forty-sixth birthday, I told a woman who asked well-nigh my age that I was forty. She laughed and asked if I was sixty.

But this chai-guy encounter sparked me to lie in the other direction.

What if I start telling these men I am eighty-five? I thought to myself as I crush my Mahindra scooter yonder from the chai shop. This idea made me smile, and I immediately felt increasingly empowered.

Instead of feeling red-faced of my skin, I decided to hand it right when to them.

I no longer superintendency what they or you think well-nigh how I look, and I put zero energy into my appearance.

It doesn’t matter to me considering inside I finger amazing.

I practice the whole of Ashtanga yoga’s challenging intermediate series six days a week, which is something I never in my wildest dreams thought would be possible in my forties, and I surf every day.

The young twenty-something Indian surf guys are now giving me fist pumps and saying, “You are really surfing and transmissible some big waves now!”

And they have stopped asking well-nigh my age.

I felt tabbed to share this story considering it made me wonder: Why are we not unliable to age?

Why is it an embarrassment to have old-looking skin?

Why can’t I have wrinkles and grey hair and own it?

This is what the soul does.

It ages.

So then why are we not meant to squint our age? Or in my specimen plane older!

I have decided to take a stand and turn the tides.

I am ultimatum my age and my place in the surf line and voicing my truth.

We are unliable to age.

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