It has been said that until we can define something we can't think about it. The brain needs a handle of sorts to grab onto what it wants to talk to itself about. The problem with that, of course, is definitions are very dangerous territory. How we define something is critical to how we measure it. Definitions being as powerful as they are, I approach them they way I do people dancing on the subway: they may be harmless, and even entertaining, but I keep my eye on them just in case.
I've been in this mode of intelligence gathering since I turned 50 about the definition of beauty. This is one of the big questions, the kind we were presented with in Philosophy 101--which never got solved, of course, or there would be no need for Philosophy 201 and its accompanying tuition. In fairness, these big questions do take time to work through, especially when interrupted by breast cancer and buying a convertible, which not surprisingly were events in my life that happened very close together.
The biggest problem with a 50+ year old woman talking about beauty is getting over that tinny echo of defensiveness. One begins to avoid the discussion at all because it has that ring of doth protesting too much, as if we are hiding the truth of our dismay behind a lemons-to-lemonade approach to what is seen as our decline. Well, fuck that. There has never been a topic off limits to my mind. So, I think I will start where I always do: with the truth as I experience it, not heard it to be.
My experience is that beauty does not end, but it changes. And now I understand exactly how, which is a feeling similar to when I gave birth to my children--an amazing lightness after being weighted down for what seemed like a lifetime, and having my body back to myself, not housing another. There is a freedom in that which I can still call up, so radical and physical was its shift in me.
My beauty, when younger, was the beauty of youth. It was male-centric, exterior, and had a shine of innocence, even with all I had been through. It was lovely, in its own right, though even then I felt its limits and pushed against them, to no avail. I wanted to feel confident, and I rarely did, though I learned how to mimic it for success and survival. I wanted autonomy, but I craved male attention as if captive to some inner imperative I did not understand. I hated my innocence. I wanted to slice through it and find that self-comfort I saw embodied in some older women. Yet, when youth began its slow drip away, I felt a static of fear firing across my brain. It had been all that I'd known of beauty; it had been my truth.
And now, a new definition is in its place. I cannot take credit for it; it was not a flash of insight. That drip of draining youth, it turns out, was being captured in a crystal glass, just waiting for me to drink. This is a Socratic beauty: where the inner and the outer are as one. Where once male attention was a measure, my attention to how it feels to create beauty is now its entire reason. As I have freed from dressing for another, my style has flourished in the joy of creating it anew each day, something I never knew when I was desperate to be seen. It is now Intelligence, as C.S. Lewis spoke of it in his wife--that synergy of wisdom, confidence and humor about it all. All that, with the tender care and feeding of my body as it is now: beautiful, vital, and not young.
If we as women do not get over this conversation being classified as sour grapes by those too young or too afraid to flourish in this ripened beauty, we will go on cramming into a too-young definition like we do those skinny jeans, looking desperate and unable to breathe. We will create daughters terrified of its arrival, who get Botox in their twenties, instead of those who, with their friends, celebrate their mothers' beauty, call them friend and are not afraid.
When I was in my thirties, I had a meeting with a woman in her fifties. Her hair, in a perfect chignon, was a silver blond, as mine is now. Her posture betrayed a life of dance. Her makeup was a beige canvas for a lipstick so red I see it still. While everyone drank coffee from Styrofoam cups, she drank her tea from a china cup with saucer. She laughed easily. She said no with grace and an utter lack of guilt. I felt see-through beside her; she was substance and everything I wanted to be. She did not covet my youth, nor did she dismiss it. She shined on me. She knew our different beauties; I was not her enemy.
Fifty is not the new thirty. It is the new fifty. And it's beautiful as can be.
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