"Like Fine Wine"

There is a standard procedure that emergency room patients go through when inspected upon arrival in hospitals. Stripped naked, they are spun around, poked and prodded with cold metal tools and cotton headed sticks. Limbs are shuffled around and tallies are made: Eight bruises on the right hip. Femur broken in three places. Five missing teeth. Our physical vessels wear and tear easily, and therefore frequent hospital visits are vital in order to push their physical longevity to the limit. But time, despite being a natural predator to all living things, is a factor we mustn't fight against. Physical symbols of age and cumulative experience should be welcomed as a reward for being alive and participating in the act of living.

Never has there been an instance of someone successfully averting the dirty footsteps age leaves behind as it drags itself forward. To live is to constantly mar one’s physical body. As we tumble in the violent streams of life, we are manhandled by its turbulent waters, and, as a result, we get altered by the elements. A toddler, scraping her knee on a misplaced rock on her fall down from her tricycle. Or a boy, making the decision to order a burger over a salad at a restaurant.

If one is breathing, they should expect to face some kind of physical repercussion for any experience they go through. Making any kind of decision to proceed with any kind of action yields some physical change in the human body to some degree. For example, deciding to stay up all night on a school night sags under our eyes, leaves us tired, and void of energy the next day. Even something as minimalistic as walking to class outside as opposed to inside can impact body temperature, triggering a change in how much calories the body has to burn to maintain a neutral temperature. Change is always happening within our physical bodies as they struggle to keep up to our daily lives and the conditions we put them under. The smallest events can snowball into greater situations, causing larger impact, with longer-term effects, until, finally, at the end of life, we can look at our bodies and trace over souvenirs of their stay, or what are commonly known as scars. Scars stand as symbols of victory against life's many adversities, and tokens of survival against its rampant streams and elements.

But in a society that fetishizes youth and worships innocence, scars are not appreciated. Among the facade of flawless figures, skin, and people, possession of scars is often shamed, as if having experienced things is something to be ashamed of. This is directed especially toward females. The preconceived notion of a woman requiring to be untouched by and innocent to any element (be it age, experience of any kind, or even other humans) to be considered worthy is still prevalent in some of today's societies, including our own. It is an expectation to invest in the preservation of one's body as it was in one's youth. Advertisements depicting doctored images of people sporting infantile qualities makes possession of the eerie collection of physical features a trend. If one makes their way down a makeup aisle of any convenience store, they will be bombarded with anti-aging creams, scar serums, and wrinkle masks, persuading people to feed into the idea that possession of youthful physical attributes are what makes an ideal person, setting a standard image of what people should, or should strive to, look like.

Upholding these standards is highly illogical and inappropriate, and so is promoting them. Since living requires experiencing physical change regularly, trying to maintain the way one looked as a teenager throughout an entire lifetime is unnatural ( unless one has entered the state of death at a very young age.) There is no way that one can keep their exact physical attributes as they were from their youth, no matter how much Botox one injects into their faces or moisturizing creams one uses; they will still become marred by the agents of time and everything it brings with it. Instead of issuing shame to people who refuse to withhold natures influences on their bodies, we as a society should be romanticizing effects of age and the aging process as a whole.

Wrinkles, scars, bone and muscle deterioration, loss or graying of hair, loss of mobility, etc. should be welcomed as a side effect to living a fulfilling and active life instead of being portrayed as weak, unattractive, and sickly. Every age inflicted physical imperfection should be seen as par to pressing flowers into the pages of a book, flowers being experiences and book pages being human skin.

At the final moments of life, one can look in the mirror, run their fingers over a scar of a long healed knee scrape, or pat their swollen stomach, and say, “Man, those were some good times” and fall back into the details of the specific time, setting, feeling, they were in upon attaining that scar. There is no profit in adopting an illusion of perpetual youth. There is wealth in collecting scars, not avoiding them, for avoiding scarring is avoiding living and experiencing potential events one could have a physical token of forever.