The aging animal
Can you remember how it felt to relax in your own skin?
An animalistic human is seen as an anomaly. As part of a class lower than humanity itself, more base, more crude, more inclined to turn against its fellows. An animalistic human is seen to be something vicious and without thought.
The animal is something to be looked down on.
This is one of the cruelest and most isolating lies that humanity has invented. Supposedly our special traits have lead us to greatness, but does this feel like greatness to you? Our own awareness of ourselves as corporeal beings, rather than giving us permission to laze in the sun and experience the joys of our skins, has become weaponised against us by imagined systems.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
— Mary Oliver
Capitalism operates by creating a void and then offering the solution - likewise, by creating a fear and then selling a costly antidote.
We have been bullied into a fear of looking older. Not a fear of age-related mobility loss, or mental decline, or losing precious memories from our youths. Not a fear of anything real or worthwhile. We’ve been frightened into scattering our resources and our time in the impossible pursuit of staying young. To be young is the Holy Grail. And the consequence of this obsession? Fear of experience, fear of wisdom, fear of life’s fullness.
So we treat ourselves as alterable, as artificial. Snipping and needling and cutting and molding ourselves into an unnatural ideal. Wasting our waking moments — wasting this precious time in which we should be letting ourselves grow older — desperately trying to dismantle the present.
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
― Fernando Pessoa
This is something that has been forced upon women; the ideal has been imagined but the pressure is very real.
But is this what any of us would choose? Because despite the pressures, despite the potential consequences of living for ourselves — living for the experience rather than the desirability — the choice really is ours.
What would we want if we were alone, if we let ourselves be animals? How would you let yourself live in the wilderness?
Would you leave yourself unable to rot in death, unable to return to the earth?
Can you remember how it felt to relax in your own skin?
Some of the most insightful and moving posts I’ve read on substack have touched on the subject of aging, and I’d recommend having a look at those here:
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