Getting Old(er) And My Vanity Is Being Shattered

A fleeting glimpse of a man.

Who you are is who God created you to become: like His Christ.

It is much easier for me to talk to others about getting old(er).

How to be hopeful in the face of the inevitable, even death.

Easy to speak the proverbs, explore philosophies, mention hopeful expectations, and repeat positive thoughts.

But when I am facing myself in the mirror, and notice the increasing signs of aging, the signs that show this shell of a body is slowly dimishing despite growth and renewal of things beyond the physical... well, that is challenging.

This year is when I found my first grey hair on my chest (yes, I have a partially hairy chest ;)

The first appearance of grey was on the sides of my head in my late 20's... when I was starting my own small businesses from the comforts of my grandmother's home.

Althought that was a safe place, I was hard at work.

Lots of thinking, trial, error, failures, and eventual success.

In my mid-thirties the grey began appearing in my beard.

By this point (in my 44th year of earthly life), the greys are gaining on the browns and blacks and reds in my beard... and I suspect in another few years they will outnumber the others.

I keep my head's hair too short to notice the greys among the bald spaces and the other hairs.

This year another hair alteration has occurred.

Some eyebrow hairs have begun to grow longer than usual.

If you've ever seen old(er) men with very bushy / long eyebrows, you know what I'm talking about.

I usually decry vanity... yet here I am struggling with my vanity.

The ear hairs have been sprouting for a few years now, and I can't help it but pluck them every few weeks.

I wouldn't want them to get out of control like weeds in a rosefield, but we'll see if I simply let the process have its way.

I've started cutting the eyebrows down to their fellow hairs, but I'm thinking if this is simply being too vain and worried.

Very soon I likely won't have time to be focused on such things, so at least I'll have a record of having written about yet another struggle of mine... another human frailty and reflection of the world around me.