I Am In Love with My Wrinkles (Part 3)
Click here to read part two.
I’ve been sharing with you that I am in love with my wrinkles. Here’s how I got to fall in love with them…
It all hit me one sunny Sunday morning as Darrell and I were making our way through Los Angeles traffic. I thought about how I have been transformed by the gift of my life’s challenges, wins and losses, and how much I love the older and wiser version of my Self that I have become. I saw that my wrinkles are not only part of the package that came with those life experiences, but they were the very stripes and awards earned due to them. I realized that who I am today is inseparable from the wrinkles that formed me.
Every wrinkle, every experience, every lesson I learned and challenge I faced, contributed to making me exactly who I am today. All the gifts and talents I now possess and use to create my life according to my own design, to live it on my own terms, and to contribute to others are represented in those wrinkles. Because of everything I claimed along with the territory of those wrinkles, I am now creating my own inspiring, playful, passionate, and radically purposeful second half of life.
My grandmother loved her wrinkles!
According to the Ancient Art of Chinese Face Reading, when we erase our wrinkles, we erase our gifts. Our wrinkles show how we have lived our life and even what we are designing in our future. Horizontal lines on the face are signs of lessons learned in life when we experience challenging times. This philosophy states that, if we remove those wrinkles, we lose the lesson… which means we may encounter the same challenge again to re-learn the lesson. Now why would we want to do that!
My wrinkles remind me of my growth, the path I have traveled, and who I am becoming. They serve as road signs alerting me to utilize my choice of who I want to be. They wake me up daily to the power I have to transform who I am as a matter of my word and commitments.
In The Back Forty, we propose that we have all chosen the specific experiences and events of our lives to create a laboratory for research and development which, when assessed, allow us to discover what we are really here to do.
My wrinkles remind me of the lab experiments I chose to conduct in my life to gain the gifts, the learnings, and the growth I now possess.…which give me the keys to an exciting, joyful, and radical Back Forty – my second half – and to living it on my own terms.
I am in love with my wrinkles.
And I invite YOU to fall in love with YOURS.
