I Am The Rider AND The Horse

All summer long I've been holding onto a piece about physical appearance, aging, etc.  Still holding.

I just chanced upon this blog post by Larry Livermore on the topic.  It's not me, not my voice, not my thoughts, well not any of them exactly. And also -  it's not irrelevant to my issue:

Of course looks matter.  They matter immensely.  Trying to pretend – or fool oneself into believing – that they don’t has been the source of endless disappointment, conflict and mental illness.  That holds true whether you’re talking about who you fall in love with, the sort of work you devote your life to, or the esteem in which you hold other people or yourself.

“At age 50, every man has the face he deserves,” said George Orwell, and while I wonder how he figured that out (having himself died at 46), I suspect it’s true even if you cut “at age 50″ from the equation.  Yes, a pretty, unblemished young face can mask a malevolent disposition, but not for long and only if you don’t look closely enough.

I think people make the mistake of believing that “growing up” (or growing old) means to accept, even revel in encroaching physical decrepitude while cultivating “higher things” like truth, wisdom, inner beauty, that sort of crap.  In my opinion, this will never work, and by that I don’t mean it’s possible or even desirable to look 18 or 21 forever – well, maybe; let me get back to you on that one – but that the minute you start thinking you can trade external for internal beauty, the minute you think that the two can even be separated, you begin to lose both.

I have a lot to say, and not to say, on the topic. It's hard to escape the truths in Larry's words. And yet, there are those (see the Talmud story about the wine and the barrels) who wish to say beauty doesn't matter (though I know of no other way to understand the prohibition of a kohein having a blemish, than to say that looks matter). (And what to make of the Talmudic ruling that one must see his spouse before he marries her "lest he find something reviling in her..?")

One thing i think we can all agree on is that caring for our body for health reasons is a must, at least according to a true Jewish ethic (despite the "religious" inclination to let one's body go). 

Our soul only has one home on this earth.

Here's something I wrote 5 years ago:

Are Those Rubber Sole Shoes?
By Neil Fleischmann

One day my body
will fall away
like a peanut shell.
That's what I learned
in my yeshiva days.

Those were just words,
and that was long before
the nut started cracking,
filling with dotted lines
to tear upon.

Those were just words,
spoken without due respect
to "the irrelevant piece,
the unessential,
the husk."

I'm 45 and it's 7:20 A.M.
treadmill sweat trickles my head.
I self inflict pain because I -
the rider and the horse -
I want to stay alive.