The Man Beyond The Mirror

I am a well-built man with dark-hair and strong, clear features that end in a handsome smirk which women love. I’m really quite impressive. Impressive, that is, until I look in a mirror and see that this young man I think I am has been replaced with the much older man that I’ve become.

These days I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror, pathetically adjusting the light above it, and I notice that my skin has wrinkled and the flesh under my eyes has pooled into comical flaps of sorrow. Stepping back, I can see that my stomach is now a silly little paunch that has spread out over my hips and down around my slowly sagging ass. Not wanting to look at this any longer, I sometimes step in closer again, only to find that most of the hair has dropped from my head and is now coiling from my ears, nostrils and brows. There are moles and pustules and all manner of protrusions sprouting from my face, and worst of all, as I glance behind me in the mirror I often catch a fleeting glimpse of pretty young women looking right though me. It would really be very funny, if it wasn’t me.

It’s as if all those who have aged and died before me are bending time, having a good laugh at my arrogance, not allowing me to ever again move the bathroom light or my body to an angle that will let me see the man that is in my mind. No longer can I find that young man who I once thought was eternal. Gone is that tireless father of baby girls who were as beautiful as he was. Absent from the looking glass is that newly married husband who had his chance with other women but who wanted his wife – and only wife - to love his looks.

Men of my age face their aging in various ways. There are those who, at the first sign of flabby pecs and graying or thinning hair, let themselves go altogether, throwing it all away in one toss, proudly pretending that they planned this all along as they eat and nap and smoke their way toward the grave in rumpled sweat pants. There are those who are Spartan and narcissistic and who build a dam against this aging with sun lamps and barbells and shaved heads, with extramarital affairs and diets of leafy greens and water and lean meat. There are those who have won the genetic lottery and for whom aging comes very slowly; their hair stays full and whitens only at their temples; their bodies stay trim and their skin smooth; they face very little in the way of aging until one day they wake up cursed and frightened like Dorian Gray to see that their peers have become fat and old and are dropping like flies around them.

And then there are the rest of us. Men who resist as best we can, who try within reasonable means to stay healthy and fit, but who by any means still continue to slide into old age first by inches and then – I am presuming – by feet, yards and miles. We ordinary men don’t eat any more than we used to, we don’t brush our teeth any less or take any less care with our grooming or exercise, but the returns are diminishing. One day we wake up and we can’t run as fast as we used to, the next our knees ache painfully when we run at all so we begin to walk as fast as we can until one day soon even walking fast will be a luxury that we will keep in reserve for the grandchildren we hope to have. There is only one thing that men like us can do - we have to lose our vanity to gain our peace.

No matter what the mirror tells me, I will always stubbornly look beyond the mirror to see myself as that young man who lived in part by his looks, who could attract and be attracted, whose body may not have been perfect, but whose imperfections only added to his beauty. This I believe is part of our survival mechanism, for if I truly allowed what was happening to me to register, I would likely not be able to go on.

And that brings me to the soul of who we are. And to the fact that we have to believe we are timeless. No matter how much the mirror argues with me, who I am is who I am and who I will always be. This is not vanity, but the path to something more promising than a perfect body and youthful looks. Those things will fade eventually no matter what we do, but the image of a young, fresh spirit – well that is something we can truck around with us forever, all through this life and into the next.

We must go on seeing ourselves as the young men in the mirror. We are 15 or 20 or 30. We are strong and vital and with our devil-may-care humor and our brazen intelligence we are making people smile and think. We are closer to the beginning of our lives than we are to the end of them and anything is possible. It’s all a cycle, anyway, and if you have been lucky enough to give birth to children or sound ideas or good work that has helped others even in small ways, than you will live forever as that man you see in your mind even if he can no longer to be found in the mirror.

Last week I was driving in a car with a female colleague, catching a ride from one work activity to the next. We were chatting about our parents, and this woman –who I presume to be in early middle age – just happened to tell me that her mother was born in 1954. If I had been driving the car at that moment, we surely would have crashed into a wall. This woman’s mother was only two years older than I am. How can it be, I thought, that this middle-aged woman in her thirties is so much younger than me that she could be my own daughter?

Well, I’ll tell you how it can be. It can be because God has a sense of humor and if we laugh along with him we will see that years and time and age are just the realities of a fool. When I thought of this in the car last week I started making jokes and talking as if I were a kid again. I became the young man with the smirk that women loved. I became strong and beautiful once more. And in becoming this, I was free.