How To Control Your Life

Part 31

7 min readJun 11, 2015

Keep young and beautiful,
It’s your duty to be beautiful,
Keep young and beautiful
If you want to be loved

Each wrinkle in your skin -
Rub it out and rub a dimple in;
Keep young and beautiful
If you want to be loved

From the song Keep Young and Beautiful (Lyrics by Al Dubin)
as sung and performed in the 1933 film Roman Scandals by Eddie Cantor and a Busby Berkeley chorus (still pictured)

For centuries we’ve searched for the secret of eternal youth - and we’re still searching. Cleopatra reputedly bathed in asses’ milk; Countess Bathory exsanguinated young village girls; Serge Voronoff favoured monkey glands. Today we have all this and more (although people are using their own blood rather than other people’s, thanks for which go to researchers at Stamford University), and fortunes are made daily by those offering the final secret of not growing old.

The search has become ever more frantic and, although it can hardly be said (particularly given the exploits of the Countess) that it has become more bizarre, it is a strange one and now even the very young are on the hunt for youth.

Dr Christian Jessen, in a television series by Crackit Productions and broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, visited a London secondary school, complete with a mature male model of average looks. Dr Jessen placed the model in front of the students and asked them to say what was ‘wrong’ with him and what surgical procedures they would recommend (by drawing, as a surgeon might do, on the model’s body with a felt-tipped pen.). By the time they finish advising nips, tucks, lifts and suction the viewer is left wondering firstly if the man shouldn’t have been built differently in the first place, and secondly how much therapy he’s going to need after this little exercise.

The model was a perfectly normal man with perfectly average looks for his age.

Dr Jessen then showed some of the students, with the use of face ageing software, what they would look like when they reached middle age, under different circumstances of life, such as smoking, or drinking excessively, or not. The students (perhaps rather sobered back to reality by the felt-tipped pen horror they had created on that poor man’s body) came to a realisation that ageing wasn’t quite such a fearful thing if, when they reached middle age, they would look like the healthy version of themselves.

Is it mirrors - the shatteringly clear glass and aluminium, and even magnifying, ones we have now rather than the pool of water, bronze shields and pans, or polished stones and the like of old - which have accelerated our search for beauty and eternal youth? Or magazines and other media (and thus the ability to see the enhanced faces and figures of millions of other people)? Or is it something in us which, given more and more tantalising glimpses of the promised desideratum by the cosmetics, surgical and chemical industries, has been exacerbated to a point of near madness?

Or is it perhaps that we don’t want to grow up and grow old and then die?

Whatever it is, you have to control it in yourself if you want to stay in control of your life. You know that no beauty cream in the world is going to turn you from the age you are into a young teenager again. No cosmetic surgeon, however brilliant, is going to produce a face which looks credibly younger and stays that way (or can be renewed indefinitely) without a rather strange and, yes, plastic result. No pill or serum or injected poison will stop the ageing process. We are human, and part of the human condition is being finite - and knowing it.

What does looking young mean?

Really? Everyone? No - it’s a spectrum. Some people look old by the time they’re in their mid-twenties; some people still look young in their sixties or beyond. Some people always have poor teeth, some go to their late graves with perfect teeth. Some people keep their hair colour, others lose it in their teens. Some children are ugly, some very old people are attractive.

Cosmetics - and cosmetic surgery and all the rest of it - is all about recreating the characteristics on the left-hand side of the table (and more, the table certainly isn’t definitive). Lipstick makes lips rosy red, like the lips of young babies and children (or some babies and some young children). Botox plumps out the face in an attempt to recreate the plumpness of youth. Liposuction and Lycra do their bit in trying to make the older body as firm as the young is naturally. The market in face creams which purport to give the mature face the glow of youth has made many millionaires. In fact the ‘secret of eternal youth’ business has enriched countless snake oil salespeople throughout the centuries.

But the secret of eternal youth is surely more than looking young. (However it’s certainly not doing the Peter Pan thing either, persisting in indulging on a daily basis in activities more suited to the young. Or littering our desks with toys, or dressing in the fashions of people thirty years our juniors, or adopting their slang and attitudes.)

In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus says of Cleopatra:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety

and in the bible (Joel 2:28):

…your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions

and this is the nub of it. If you become rigid, stale, unable to change and grow any more, you are old.

Instead of concentrating on eliminating wrinkles (as if we needed ironing), we should concentrate on not becoming inflexible. We should keep learning, getting excited about things, having new ideas and carrying them out. Dreaming dreams, certainly, but chasing them. Seeing visions and communicating them. The person who does all this, who is still energised by and responsive to life, is not old. They may have wrinkles and some of the rest of it, but that’s not what other people around see in them - it’s the life.

People like this have a long life. Not necessarily in years (although, accidents apart, people who continue to respond to life, flexibly and with interest and enquiry, tend to live longer than those who don’t), but in the life they live. A life where each minute counts for something - new thoughts, new ideas, a change of direction or focus, response - is a life lived, a long life. Each minute has been lived, not sat through.

Enjoy life by responding to it. You don’t have to like it - you can get angry with it, grab it by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shaking, force it to change - but respond. Know yourself and what you’re doing, where you’re going. Take the controls and fly your life - and keep on doing it until you decide it’s time to stop.

Because you will. One day you will think: “I’m old now, it’s time to die” and then your life will be over and that will be OK with you. But it will only be like that, if you are young - flexible, curious, interested, responsive, seeking, excited - all your life. If you start giving constant clichéd responses to life (“I’m too old to change my ways now”; “Been there, done that, know it all”; “When you get to my age…”; “I’ve always said that…” - and your own clichés that you’ve developed at one stage in your life and then fixed in stone, and all those stones have killed the living things underneath), then you’re not young, even if you haven’t accrued many years.

And your face and your body and everything about you will look dull, lifeless and old.

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigour of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.

Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living.
Youth by Samuel Ullman (1840–1924)

Twitter: @MaryonJeane

How To Control Your Life

Part 31

Written by Maryon Jeane