Читать книгу The Longevity Book: Live stronger. Live better. The art of ageing well. - Cameron Diaz, Cameron Diaz - Страница 10

IN A BUSINESS THAT is obsessed with youth, I am no longer considered a young woman. This was made clear as soon as I hit the ripe old age of thirty-nine. I can’t tell you how many times a journalist asked me if as an actress, I was scared to turn forty. As these questions about my age seemed to become a consistent part of every press interview, I realized just how frightened we all are of getting older. We make jokes about it, or we see it as sad, as ugly, as dangerous.

The conversation we have around ageing in our culture feels very misplaced to me. Am I afraid to turn forty? These people who were asking about my age in front of a camera weren’t wondering if I was afraid that my health might decline after forty. They weren’t concerned that my organs might experience the effects of ageing. They weren’t asking what ageing means to me, as a woman, as a human being, as a living organism with an expiration date.

They were saying, “Aren’t you afraid that the death of your career is imminent because you don’t look twenty-five anymore?”

The funny thing is, those people who suggested that I’d reached my expiration date at an age when I still felt pretty damn good were actually doing me a real favour: they were jump-starting my thought process about what ageing is and what kind of impact it will have on me. The conclusion I came to was that as long as I get to keep on ageing, I’m pretty lucky. Not everyone has the opportunity to grow old. Some people die before they have a chance to celebrate another birthday.

So to answer the questions those journalists asked about how my opinion of myself has changed as my looks have changed, my answer is that ageing is a privilege and a gift. As we get older, I believe beauty appreciates, not depreciates. It grows, not fades. With age, I have developed a more nuanced understanding of what beauty really is. Beauty is not just something you are born with. Beauty is something you grow into.

As I start this next phase of my journey, I feel proud of where I’ve come from and curious about what’s ahead. I don’t know what life will hold for me. But I am ready. Because I know myself better than I did years ago, and I trust myself to make good decisions, or at least to do my best. Because I value the lessons that I’ve learned, especially in the last decade, and I look forward to seeing what kinds of new understandings the decades ahead will bring.

WHERE DID YOU LEARN ABOUT BEING BEAUTIFUL?

My first model of beauty was my mother. I don’t think I’m being partial when I say this: my mum is a beautiful woman. She has always had full lips, glowing skin, and blue eyes with a depth of grey that draws you in. She possesses the kind of beauty that shines from the inside out. So as far as I was concerned, she never needed any makeup, but like most other women, she had a “face” that she would apply daily. She would highlight her eyes, brighten her cheeks, and lengthen her lashes. She was so skilled in her routine that it took her exactly the same amount of time every morning to complete it, and her face always looked exactly the same after she had finished. What was even more impressive to me was how subtle but effective her application was at complementing her already luminous beauty.

When we were little, my sister and I loved watching our mum go through this routine and couldn’t wait to be old enough to learn how to do it ourselves. And once we were finally old enough – man, we really went for it. Subtlety may have been my mother’s gift, but there was little of that in our technique. There were many times when it would have been challenging to distinguish my sister and me from a pair of peacocks. It took years before we learned to refine our hand and apply our “face” a bit less liberally, and even more years before I understood what the point of this ritual really was.

Now I know that adornment is a natural instinct. All over the world, men and women alike invest in beauty rituals to make themselves more attractive. In the Serengeti, Masai warriors spend days decking themselves out in tribal gear, adorning themselves from head to toe with vibrantly coloured jewellery and clothing. They paint their faces and plait their hair in elaborate weaves. Some of this decoration serves as an indicator of each man’s position in the tribe, and some is simply for beauty’s sake – but in either case, the goal is to stand out from the crowd and attract a woman. It can take a warrior and a companion a week to apply the embellishments. A week! That’s a pretty significant amount of time for a man who’s also in charge of keeping his family’s livestock – and his family – safe from predators.

Why am I talking about the beauty rituals of men in a book meant for women? Because they help us understand that the desire to look beautiful, the drive to stand out, isn’t restricted by age or culture or gender. In fact, it’s not even restricted to humans. Animals also possess an instinct for visual attraction, as with the infamous peacock, the spirit animal of my earliest makeup attempts. Richly hued flowers flirt with insects who might spread their pollen near and far. Wanton trees and vines entice animals with beautiful, ripe fruit so the seeds can be dispersed. All of us, from birds to bees to humans, are hopelessly attracted to bright, shiny colours, which is why nature uses them to such great effect.

In the animal and plant kingdoms, beauty is an evolutionary imperative, but when it comes to humans, it is about so much more. Clothing and adornment and makeup can be part of a personal narrative, can be about belonging, about blending in, or about standing out. Beauty is an instinct we all share, but our definitions of what is beautiful and our expectations for ourselves and others are shaped, in part, by cultural and social values.

Throughout our lives, we are exposed to ideas about what beauty is, how important it is, and what we can do to make ourselves more beautiful. When we are young we are receptive to those ideas almost without realizing it.

THAT YOUTHFUL GLOW

When my sister and I were fifteen-year-olds painting on hot-pink lips and sparkly blue eyes in an attempt to look older, we were oblivious to the fact that most women actually apply makeup to look younger. When it comes to fifteen-year-olds, nature is in the habit of generously handing out rounded cheeks still plump with baby fat, bodies unaffected by gravity, and shiny, silky hair. Of course, as self-conscious teenagers, we never would have thought of ourselves as beautiful.

In fact, few women seem to fully recognize the attributes they possess when they possess them. I think we’ve all had the experience of looking at a picture that was taken ten years ago and thinking, “Wow! I was so young and pretty back then. But I know I didn’t feel that way when the picture was taken. Why didn’t I realize how great I looked?” The truth is that you didn’t appreciate how great you looked then because you weren’t thinking about where you were on your journey through life. That moment when you thought you looked “old”, when you were twenty-five or maybe thirty-five, is the same moment you are experiencing right now, when you are both the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you will ever be. And in ten years, when you look at a photo of yourself that was taken today, you will notice how young you look, and wonder why you didn’t realize it then. It’s just what we do.

When you possessed those attributes of youth, you also probably didn’t think about the fact that that they wouldn’t last forever. You probably couldn’t imagine that one day you would notice that your skin wasn’t as smooth as it used to be, or that the hair on your head was becoming less lustrous, or that random hairs were cropping up in strange places. You couldn’t possibly envision that your body would find itself on the losing end of gravity at some point. But there comes a time in all our lives when we become aware that we are starting to age. We find our first grey hair or notice laughter lines in the mirror that seem to have appeared overnight. And at that moment you might ask yourself: What the hell is going on?!

Well, dear female friend, what is happening to you is also happening to every living organism on the planet, because all living creatures age. The process can take one day, as in the case of the mayfly, or as long as 250 years, as with giant land tortoises. As soon as we are sexually mature enough to reproduce, ageing happens to us all. With each day that goes by, imperceptible changes are taking place within our cells, and as the decades accumulate, those changes begin to show up as streaks of grey, and as wrinkles, and in a lot of other superficial ways.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTI-AGEING TREATMENTS

The desire to be forever young is not a modern-day preoccupation – just ask Ponce de León. Anti-ageing procedures have been around for millennia. Some are gross. Some are weird. Some rely, ironically, on dead people. And some, even more ironically, will actually kill you. Here’s a brief history of the anti-ageing industry.

Circa 70 BCE:

Cleopatra reputedly enjoyed facial masks made of readily available crocodile poop from the Nile.

Ancient Egyptians:

Used eye pencils made of lead, a heavy metal linked to skin diseases, infertility, and death.

Ancient Greeks:

Sought youthful skin through application of white face cream laced with, you guessed it, lead.

Ancient Romans:

Relied on the ammonia in urine to whiten their teeth.

1513:

Ponce de León set out to find the fountain of youth. Ended up in Florida (currently the state with the highest percentage of elderly people in the United States) instead.

Circa 1600:

In the kingdom of Hungary, Countess Elizabeth Bathory reportedly bathe in the blood of virgins to maintain her youthful glow, giving rise to centuries of vampire legends.

15th-19th century:

Europeans learned nothing from the fall of Rome and sought fairer complexions by using poisonous creams made of lead – because dying young is a great way to stay young forever.

1905:

Surgeons began to offer skin-tightening procedures whereby they made a couple of facial incisions at the side of the face and tugged the skin back. Voilà: the facelift was born. The first textbook on the subject was published a year later in Chicago.

1906:

Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which said that Americans must stop putting poisons (like lead) on their faces.

1992:

Botox was introduced as a treatment for brow wrinkles, and we began to inject poison into our faces instead of simply applying it on our faces.

2010s:

A predilection for exotically sourced face masks emerged, a throwback to Cleopatra’s reptile-excrement treatments. Bee venom and placenta face masks can easily be purchased online.

2015:

A woman in the UK said that she will quit smiling for forty years in an attempt to avoid getting wrinkles. Other women laughed about this.

There are plenty of methods to make ourselves look like we’ve shaved off a few years, of course. American women spend $30 billion a year on cosmetics, and I am no different from most women. I’ve applied makeup to my face for more than a quarter of a century. I’ve spent hours in salons getting my hair coloured and cut. I’ve visited my fair share of dermatologists’ offices exploring their anti-ageing arsenals, from creams to lasers to Botox and fillers, all for the sake of maintaining a look of youth and beauty. Many beauty products and procedures really do live up to their promise. They make us feel a little shinier, a little plumper, a little smoother, a little bit better about ourselves. They help us look younger on the outside, which can make us feel like we are younger on the inside. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But while a fancy treatment can make you look like you’ve had eight hours of sleep a night for the last decade, your cells know the truth about how you’ve been spending your waking and sleeping hours. Looking younger is not the same thing as “anti-ageing”. The ability to colour our hair and smooth our skin doesn’t change the fact that every part of our body is ageing every single day.

Believe me, I know that it’s easy to get caught up with what you see in the mirror and use it as a metric for how well you are ageing. But don’t be fooled: just because you look younger than your friend doesn’t mean your body isn’t experiencing some wear and tear. This ageing thing is a process, and we all have our own individual journey through it. What I’d like for you to be aware of as you take that journey is that ageing isn’t just about your face (or your neck, or your upper arms, or your hands, or …). It’s about your whole body. And how you take care of your whole body will affect each and every one of your parts, inside and out.

THE NEW CONVERSATION ABOUT AGEING

I made my career in a business that must bear a large part of the responsibility for how we, as a society, view ageing – a business that tells us that older is ugly or older is less valuable. The message is screaming from every elevation. Think about all the places we see it each day – in magazines, at bus stops, in shop windows, on billboards, and in our homes via television or the Internet. Everywhere you look, the signal is broadcast to women loud and clear: act fast, buy now, change who you are so you don’t succumb to the ravages of age. Do not, under any circumstances, let yourself get older.

We’ve been getting messages from society about how to look for our entire lives. Even teenagers and young women are sent plenty of messages about how they should and could be more attractive. Women of all ages are bombarded with ideas about a standard of beauty that make them feel lousy or as though they have to be different. But with age it gets even more challenging, because these messages begin to suggest that we should actually be younger than we are, which is impossible. How can anyone feel good about that?

The physical reality of ageing is going to present a real, true challenge to all of us one day. The external signs of getting older are one part of the conversation, but they are not the whole conversation. Societal pressures that encourage women to deny ageing or pretend that it’s not happening – as though we should somehow be immune to the passage of time – make it an even more painful challenge.

I think it is possible to change the conversation around women and ageing – and it starts with conversations like the one we’re having here. Instead of whispering about each other for not looking twenty-five, let’s encourage real and open dialogue about what we’re feeling, what we’re wondering about, what we’re afraid of, what we’re hopeful for. Let’s agree to put more value on being a better mother, daughter, sister, wife, friend, colleague, or mentor to those around us, instead of acting as if those accomplishments are less important than having smooth skin and a perky bum.

There are many ways to make yourself look younger, but from what I’ve witnessed among the women in my life, the only way to actually feel younger is to embrace the reality that you are in fact getting older – and deal with it. Teenagers look different from toddlers, women in their fifties look different from women in their twenties. That is healthy. That is normal.

So I’d like to propose another message: I’d like to suggest that we all agree, as a group, that every age a woman passes through has its own beauty. Let’s raise our standards of beauty and remember that learning and growth and kindness are what we truly value and appreciate in our friends and our sisters and our mothers – and ourselves.

We do not need to look like the images that we are bombarded with at every turn. We do not need to accept the faulty messaging behind those polished-up pictures. We can choose our own role models, women who inspire us to be our best, not someone else’s best. We can be the healthiest, most vibrant version of ourselves that we can be.

AN APPRECIATION OF TRUE BEAUTY

For years now, I have been painting on different versions of my face in my own beauty routine. Each variation has reflected a different standard of beauty, of what I thought made me attractive to the world at that time in my life. With age, I realize, I have had an opportunity to refine not only my skill with an eyeliner pencil but also my ideas about what makes us beautiful.

Now when I say a women is beautiful, do I mean that she has good bone structure, bright eyes, coiffed hair, muscles that show she works out, curves like a racetrack? Maybe. More likely I mean that she is vibrant, that she is energetic, and exudes an understanding and an acceptance of herself and the world around her. As I make my way towards fifty, I want to earn the next milestone of my life. I want to have lived and learned something new every one of those days that got me there. I accept that I won’t be the same person at fifty that I am today. But I hope that I will be wiser, stronger, more compassionate, more conscious of the world around me. Those are the images I want to focus on when I visualize myself growing older – not this compulsion towards youth, towards yesterday, towards a picture of myself that I will never be again. That is my vision for my life. Not looking backwards at what I used to have. Looking forwards at what I might grow into.

I was at a gathering of family and friends recently, and the women in attendance spanned ages and generations. There were infants and toddlers and children, eleven-year-old girls with knobby knees and their slightly less awkward teenage sisters, and women in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. I couldn’t help but think how each woman’s beauty was different, distinct. Their smiles were all unique, the colour of their skin, their hair, the way they gestured, the way they draped their arms around one another’s shoulders or laughingly passed forks and napkins around. There was so much beauty, and none of it had anything to do with age. It had to do with the light that shone from each individual person, from their way of seeing the world and their way of being in the world.

One of the women there was someone I’ve known since I was sixteen and she was seventeen. She had been a gorgeous girl, and she is still gorgeous today. And looking at her in the sun, I suddenly wondered about how amazing it would feel thirty or forty years from now to know her still, how excited I would be to have made this incredible journey through life with her, women grown up from the girls we used to be. My mother was there, and she also looked so beautiful, and it wasn’t because of her makeup skills (even though her blue eyes still look great with a bit of framing), but because of the way she smiles and makes everyone around her feel calm and cared for. She is a beautiful woman because her nature is kind and generous, loving, grounded, and authentic in who she is.

More and more I’m finding that the circle of women around me aren’t relying on procedures to help them “appear” to be younger. They are women who are engaged in maintaining the well-being of their mind, body, and spirit. Some of them are fit and full of energy, some have the shine and sparkle of youth, and some have a wicked sense of humour that keeps them laughing at life. But what they all possess in spades is an acceptance of the journey, with all of its unpredictability. Their vitality comes from that embrace, and they meet each new challenge with all the accumulated wisdom they have earned over the years. They have become the women that they were always meant to be.

That’s true grace. That’s true beauty.