Musings on not ageing

whilst watching The Age of Adaline

Adaline doesn't age.

Imagine. Your lover ages. Your kids do. Your friends do. But you don't.  And the passage of your time is lined with their wrinkles and epitaphs - but you shine on, with unblemished unchanging youth. And you can't tell anyone about what's not happening to you because you are likely to become a specimen for experiment, a lab- microbe on the altar of science. So you keep moving,  changing identities,  and keeping your extraordinary reality a secret.  And you ensure you do not fall in love - to protect the other  from disbelief and yourself from heartbreak.

The concept is frightening.  What would your child do - seeing as she does you remaining forever young as she begins to look  like your grandmother? How would your spouse be able to cope with you,  as he loses his virility and you don't?  And you live on, seeing everything you love fall by the wayside.

I guess a person like this could well prefer to become a vampire, just to freeze one's heart into an eternal Artic of emotions and tide over the tragedy of the unending  life.

I for one would hate not to age or die. I want to grow old. I want to have grandchildren playing on my lap and trace their histories in my wrinkles, I would love to do nothing but sit holding a familiar hand, smooth though frail as it would be as age leaves its visiting card in some way, and watch the sun set over the Arabian Sea, and reminisce about days when our knees were stronger.

I have often wondered at this obsession with not allowing age to show on your faces.  I can imagine how it could be all-abiding concern for actors, whose livelihood is often dependent on looks, but people like you and me? Why?

There is grace in gray hair and charm in tales of yore. And there is hopefully a freedom of responsibilities and a lightness of being which makes the sunset years such a light and lighted time. Nothing left to prove , nothing left to achieve.  It's a time for true nirvana - observe and let go. Until we let go of the world. Such a far cry from the ambition, rush and dissatisfactions of youth.

No, no. Good people deserve to die. Always.

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Synopsis of The Age of Adaline:

A young woman, born at the turn of the 20th century, is rendered ageless after an accident. After many solitary years, she meets a man who complicates the eternal life she has settled into.

Blake Lively is incandescent in her never-ageing loneliness. And makes you soar in a role which is philosophical, heartbreaking and finally liberating.

On Prime.

Trailer:

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