The other day while picking my lunch somewhere, I overheard 2 women talking and one of them said to the other one, “Wow! you are looking so young.”, Which, lead me to think, why do we like to hear that we look young or rather the take out when we get older is “I don’t look my age.” So if I don’t look my age or look young then perhaps I also feel young and feeling young comes with its own set of emotions.

Hope, endless possibilities, freedom, bottomless pit of energy, lack of fear, and tremendous confidence that all will go as we wish. But when we get older the one thing that we assumably gain is wisdom through experiences, acceptance that all will not go as we please, the narrowing down of possibilities (which we articulate as, “I know what I don’t want anymore”), and frankly to a very large extent comfort in our own skin. The comfort probably happens only when we get older because we start looking inward, we start living with certain amount of self awareness, but when we are young there is no time for inward living, the distractions, the possibilities of what we could become, what life could be are endless and hence we are always open to every experience, and person.

So, looking young is more than just coming across as someone who cheated time. It is the fact that even when we get older, looking young makes us believe in those possibilities, to still dig for that energy and experience something new, take a chance because who knows where this could go, still be able to think that I can start over. And that is why sometimes when I look at some people, they just look that life has been tough on them, many are very young but look like they went through decades of hardships, that is probably because they accepted, because they narrowed down their choices, because they became fearful of new, because they lost confidence. And you never find yourself telling them, “Gosh! you look old.”

So I want the, “You are looking so young!” with all the comfort in my own skin. Yes, best of both the worlds is possible with a little bit of help from anti-aging creams and a lot of help from entertaining random thoughts.