AGELESS BEAUTY

A few of my high school classmates make it a point to get together periodically to catch up socially and share the latest happenings in our lives.   We put the date and time out on Facebook and we never know exactly who is going to show up.  One of our classmates, Carol, lives in Seattle but was attending a conference in Honolulu.   I think it was the first time Kevin Lopes showed up and I hadn't seen Kimo Mawae since we graduated from high school 39 years ago.   Two of the other guys live on other islands but happened to be in Honolulu for work.  It's always amazing to me how we are still connected nearly 40 years after high school.

We spent some time joking about how we sometimes don't recognize classmates until we "time machine" them back to what they looked like as a senior in high school.   Fortunately (or unfortunately) that's the visual reference point we have for some of the classmates that we don't see very much.   In fact, most of my close friends have been in my life for over 25 years, so regardless of what they look like now, I always see them as how they looked when I met them decades ago.

During the course of the evening, I started looking at each of the women there.  I visually took them back to when we met in the late '60's and laughed at myself for the "categories" I had for girls back then.  There was "nice" and "not nice" and "cute" and "not cute."  That's a commentary on how shallow you can be at 15 years old when the extent of your evaluation is how girls look and whether or not their interested in talking to you.  But the years teach us to value the journey and redefine beauty in many more dimensions than just what we look like.

I started to envision the individual journey each woman had traveled.   Each face told a different story, revealed a unique journey or made a statement about a path chosen.  No one gets the easy road, but none of them looked beaten down by the course they followed.   Well into their 50's now,  they each had a grace and strength about them that comes with motherhood and/or challenging careers.  Their natural beauty as young high school girls seemed to go inward and then re-emerge as an energy that radiated the depth of their experiences.  Each woman had a beauty about them that went way beyond their physical looks, a beauty that comes when you make peace with who you are, accept the life you've lived and put love into the world unconditionally.

A lot of women start to panic as they approach 60 years old, but I didn't see that in the women sitting around me that night.  Maybe it's because many cultures (including the Hawaiians) believe that a woman reaches her highest point of personal power when they approach and go through menopause.  This is the point where a woman can ascend to the throne to rule a country or become revered as a person of great wisdom and knowledge.

It's too bad that some people see a woman in her 50's and 60's as someone who's looks are declining or at the tail end of their careers.    But when I look at my sisters, classmates and friends, I see women who are positioned to bring their greatest gifts to the world.   They have the wisdom, the experience, the confidence and inner beauty to bring positive influence to the younger generations behind them.   Their presence is so powerful in our lives that maturation of our children and grandchildren can't take place without them.  That responsibility makes them open and willing to grow internally.

As men, these are the women who will be our partners and companions through the rest of our lives and their growth helps us to grow and expand as well.    It's no wonder that the men of our class frequently comment to me that our women classmates seem to get more beautiful as we get older.

But it's more than just beauty.  Way more.