Essay
Celebrating fifty: compliment or curse?
Recently I celebrated my 50th birthday at a get-together organized by an old friend from school. All of us turned 50 or were going to turn 50 this year. We were chatting over dinner, enjoying the easy comfort of one another's company. The restaurant owner, an acquaintance, paid us the ultimate compliment: "Ladies! You're looking good," he declared. "You don't look your age!" The four of us were sitting at a corner table--a writer, a social worker, a lawyer, a painter/culinary artisttwo of us still married, one divorced, and one widowedall of us working women and mothers. Two of us had attained menopause and two were in the process. We laughed! One thing all of us never wanted was to return to our 20s, or 30s or 40s, even if some time machine could work such a wonder. Return to those insecurity, confusion, and anxiety-ridden years? No, thanks! My social worker friend said she had dreamed of turning 50 ever since she was 10. Why? I asked her. Turning 50 was about letting your hair grow grey and crossing barriers. She explained: "Older, grey-haired women look beyond their own selves. There's a freedom, a maturity, an assertiveness, a confidence about them that younger women just don't have." A majority of women report their 50s and 60s to be their most fulfilling and happiest years. This was confirmed in a 1998 Gallup poll conducted in the United States. Provided, and here's the catchaging women are well-provided for, are not suffering from ill-health, poverty, or violence. The socio-cultural and political context in which a woman ages determines how good a woman feels. And how good she feels has very little to do with the physiological processes of aging per se. Recently I congratulated my daughter on entering the third decade of her life. "Oh, no! Ma! Don't remind me. My third decade! I'm getting old!" She was only joking, but behind her facetiousness, the collective feminine anxiety of her age is obvious. Why shouldn't it be? Aren't youth and beauty (but not too much brains) what society values and simultaneously devalues in women? To be trapped in a perpetual state of bodily perfection through mindless consumption, isn't that the panacea offered by the cosmetics and fashion industry? That promised return to the smooth skin and silken hair and skinniness of youth, if only you agree to deny who you are, dye your hair, botox your cheeks, uplift your sagging breasts, and routinely apply the miracle anti-aging night cream! If women confronted the hollowness of such false promises, and woke up to their true inner beauty, and each woman had no complaints about how she looked, and focused mainly on how she felt, and how she could share her growing wisdom and compassion with the world, surely we could change the world? No. More likely the world economy might collapse. Almost every industry would be affected by enlightened women. How would the cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, advertising, diet, fashion, pharmaceutical, mental health, and global media, to name a few, survive without insecure, approval-seeking women? The global economy is a major stakeholder blocking the path of women's spiritual emancipation. The waiter brings out the dessert platterdecadent chocolate cake and the four of us dig in! Why should we be ashamed of enjoying the richness of chocolate cake? We don't advocate overindulgence. By all means respect your body and take care of it, but don't deprive yourself of chocolate cake! Treat your body as the temple where your spiritual essence resides. There's a difference between making healthful choices and punishing your body with drastic dieting because you had that extra helping of dessert. Menopause or mini-pause? Personally, the cessation of my monthly periods was the most liberating aspect of menopause. One less thing to pack on a trip. One less date to remember. Yes, there were hot flashes to contend with. What about mood swings, memory lapses, loss of libido, weight gain, depression and sleep disturbances? Well, they are also part of the process, and some women have it worse than others, but by and large, for most women menopausal symptoms are a passing phenomenon. Menopause and the post-menopausal years can be seen as a time of shifting gears, inviting the woman to shift her consciousness into a less rushed, more meditative stage. One could welcome this slowing down as a life-enhancing transition. So then, what makes menopause so scary, I asked my friends? My painter friend was of the opinion that 75% of the depression and mood swings we experienced were worsened due to society's negative perception. If, instead of life-is-downhill-from-here, the prevalent attitude was celebration and the welcoming of wisdom, if women were showered with flowers and praise for acquiring the status of wise crones, respected for their graying hair and widening waistlines, women would be proud of reaching menopause. And the uncomfortable physical symptoms such as hot flashes would be treated as minor irritants, things we would dismiss as transitory troubles. Menopause could then rightly be called mini-pause. Joan Borysenko, PhD, cofounder and former director of the Mind/Body Clinic, Deaconess Hospital, Harvard Medical School, writes: "In indigenous cultures, the menopausal woman becomes the storyteller--a wise woman or crone--who often develops healing powers." [see Wisdom, Zest, and Other Joys of Menopause at www.power-surge.com] . The role of socio-cultural context in determining women's self-perception in menopausal years can't be denied. In Japan, until recently, there was no word for hot flashes, that quintessential menopausal symptom. Maybe it's the Japanese diet, or Japanese genes, or Japanese culture, or a combination of all these, but most Japanese women take menopause in their stride. Dr. Dixie Mills, in her online article, "A look at menopause across cultures", explains the power of language and its role in the positive way Japanese women perceive menopause. The word for menopause in Japanese is konenki, she writes, which, roughly translated, means years of renewal or regeneration. If menopausal years are her years of self-renewal, why would a woman indulge in self-loathing? Modern women, regardless of social class, live in physical and emotional dependence on male opinion, and feel pressured to seek endorsement from the male gaze, starting in adolescence and persisting well past their fifties. The male gaze is not limited to men. It's internalized by women too, so women evaluate their own and other women's external attractiveness and self-worth based on male standards of attractiveness. If women stopped sleep-walking to the tune of the patriarchal Pied Piper, what would happen? They would wake up to their indestructible, eternal inner beauty, they would live more authentically, and live beyond borrowed definitions of aging and unattractiveness. They would delight in nurturing their maturing Self, the self which is always trying to peep out from under the debris of societal devaluations. The ageless soul's journey
'I cried a little on my 50th birthday,' my lawyer friend said. 'I think it was a momentary lapse. I was going by how society perceives us, not how I see myself. I snapped out of that self-pitying mood just as quickly. I had work. I had meetings to attend. Nothing had changed. It was just my body that had turned 50!" The body is aging and dying from the moment we enter this body. The body's aging is a wonderfully natural phenomenon. The body's job is to carry the soul safely through the world, and with each passing year, carry the soul closer to God. And reveal the real us to us. So why do we work so hard to shield ourselves from seeing who we are through the aging body's gift of self-revelation? Self-knowledge is God-knowledge. A well-known hadith (teachings attributed to Prophet Mohammad) says: 'He who knows his self (nafs) knows his Lord.' Sachiko Murata, in her anthology of Islamic teachings, The Tao of Islam, translates 11th century Sufi psychologist Al-Ghazali's discourse on self-realization with reference to this teaching. According to Al-Ghazali: '--nothing is closer to you than you. If you do not know yourself, how will you know the other? Of the inward dimension you know that when you are hungry, you eat bread, and when you are angry, you fall on the other person, and when appetite dominates, you make for the marriage act. All the beasts know that much. Hence you must seek your own reality. What thing are you? From whence have you come? Where will you go? For what work have you come to this dwelling place? Why were you created? What and where is your felicity? What and where is your wretchedness?' [italics mine] May all of us entering our fifties and living beyond, be blessed with the gift of self-knowledge. May introspection consume us. And may questions posed almost a thousand years ago by Al-Ghazali haunt us: Where have we come from? For what purpose? Where are we going? And what are the real causes of our felicity and our wretchedness? Somebody once asked the Buddha what enlightenment meant to him. The Buddha replied: "To be awake." If somebody asked me what my 50th birthday meant to me, my answer would be: "Feeling more awake than ever before."
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