A Lovely Shade Of Blue: Word Barriers
Claire George says that people who shape the world in words may not actually be looking at it.
I was browsing through magazines in a shop this morning when a photograph caught my eye. It showed a 47-year-old woman before and after a one-stitch face lift. The result was amazing. The woman’s sagging neck had been pulled tight and she had the jaw of a 27 year old. I shuddered, hoping that my neck wouldn’t go like that.
Sagging is the only thing that bothers me about ageing. I’m in my thirties now and I’m finding that getting older is so much better than staying younger. I have noticed that my body is less resilient than it used to be. I can’t eat junk food without feeling like my liver is turning into pate. But the way I see it, it’s good that I’m more sensitive to what I’m eating. It encourages me to be healthier.
The great advantage of getting older is that you feel more comfortable in your own skin. When I was 20 I couldn’t travel anywhere without a book and a mobile phone for entertainment. Now when I travel I keep a book in my handbag but I’m usually happy to sit in silence. My teenage friends listen to music through earphones almost continuously. That used to seem quite reasonable to me, but I wouldn’t do it nowadays. I’m happy to be in the world with all its sounds.
I think my capacity for melodrama is also decreasing with age. The other day I expected something good to happen and when it didn’t I was very disappointed. I was going to spend the afternoon thinking ‘woe is me,’ when I stopped myself. ‘Hang on,’ I thought ‘has anything bad happened? Has anything changed? ‘ And I realised that life was just as good as it was before my disappointment. Nothing bad had actually happened.
The thing that most surprises me about getting older is that my relationship with words has changed. I was a teenage bookworm. In my twenties I wrote incessantly. These days I won’t write unless I actually have something to communicate. Words are an important form of self-expression, but I’m beginning to appreciate that they can stand between a person and their experience of the world. The biggest lesson I have learnt is that someone who is constantly shaping the world with their words may not actually be looking at it.
