Many years ago I was looking forward to a landmark high school reunion. With plenty of time to accomplish my goals, I started my pre-reunion diet. I tracked my progress not only on the scale but by tracking my measurements. When I proudly announced to my teen-age son that I had lost a quarter-inch off my ankles—that’s a quarter-inch per ankle, mind you—he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Mom, remember that this is the part they put in the ground when you die.”
That started me wondering why, so many years after high school, we are still so intent on impressing those people. Is it because we associated with them during the turbulent teen-age years when we all wanted so much to belong and be admired? What does it say about us if we are still stuck in thinking that tells us we are defined largely by how we look and how we are perceived by our peers?
Now that I’ve passed the half-century mark—okay, okay, so I’ve hit the speed limit—I’ve finally realized that I am not going to morph back into a twenty-five year old anywhere but in my imagination. (Okay, possibly in my husband’s as well.) I recently ran across a photo of myself at twenty-two on my first visit to these beautiful islands of Hawaii I now call home. I showed it to my five-year-old granddaughter. She said, “Grandma, you could get that skinny again if you exercised every day all day long.” Personally, I’m not sure even that would do anything but blow a kneecap or pop a shoulder. Sure, I do my best to hold the line, but I’ve decided it is time to work on my inner beauty.
Here are a few things to ask yourself before your next high school reunion.
“Am I more charitable now than I was in high school?”
“Am I a good listener? Do I care about who these people have become or do I just care about impressing them?”
“Am I genuinely able to be happy for their accomplishments and commiserate with them about their setbacks?”
If not, there is still time to start working out spiritually before the big event. First, let’s worry about fine lines. We should worry about the fine line between being kind and unkind, the fine line between right and wrong, the fine line between responsibility and irresponsibility. We should worry about lines we draw that shut people out and lines we draw to call people out. We should worry about lines we use when we are being less than sincere.
Rather than worry about being lighter, we should worry about having more light. When talking about the fact that LDS students at the BYU Jerusalem center were not allowed to proselyte, an official of the government asked, “But what about the light in their eyes?” One year I pulled out an old junior high school yearbook, and as I glanced through it, I was struck by the fact that I could see which students had light in their eyes. It didn’t matter if they had funky hairdos or squirrelly glasses or if they were the good-looking kids. Try it sometime. For some, there was just something in their eyes. I didn’t judge by my knowledge of which kids were members of the Church and which weren’t. I judged by what was showing in their eyes.
Forget using face cream to minimize your pores. We should be worried about minimizing the number of poor among us.
We should worry more about sagging spirits and less about sagging body parts.
We should worry less about having crooked teeth and more about having crooked habits.
We should worry about whether it is our patience that is wearing thin, not our hair.
We should not worry about love handles. Love handles just about any situation you can find yourself in.
We should be more concerned about our double standards than our double chins.
And did you know that you can give yourself a face lift merely by smiling?
If you start now working on your inner beauty, all day every day, you’ll be prepared for the one reunion that really matters.