Our youth is a gift from God; aging into our real beauty is our gift to God.
Sixteen years ago I was in the throes of my second divorce and about to turn forty. For all I knew, my world had ended and my finding love or anything else for that matter, after forty was a lost cause–I was a lost cause.
I had no vision of my own future. All I had was the picture in my mind of my widowed grandmother sitting in her chair for the last decades of her life. That picture scared me half to death.
Then out of the blue, a wise friend gave me a precious gift: a black and white photo of a stunning, incandescent woman in her late fifties. This photo became my vision for the future. Having no idea who she was, I simply embraced her as family and hung her in my hall gallery with the faces of my beloved children. Her dynamic, radically honest, even all-knowing presence, somehow gave me great hope.
Over time, she became my silent teacher. It was there in her quiet radiance that I
began to recognize my own Self. Gradually, I came to see that I was worthy of love and that there lived within me an eternal kind of beauty that only I could set free.
Gradually I stopped fighting growing older and began aging into beauty.
I let my hair turn silver and white and grew it long and wild down my back. Wrinkles became the precious evidence that I had lived with courage and labored with might and laughed with joy.
Until finally, instead of feeling like a lost cause, I began taking up a cause. My cause. Finding authenticity in who I am presently. Our cause.
Changing the way we think about growing older. I invite you to embrace this courageous journey of aging into the beauty of who we truly are.
(Note from Soulmate Dance: When Pamela made this turnaround in her life, she met and married the love of her life. Love is always within just waiting for you to clear its path.)
Pamela Nebeker is an entrepreneur, interior designer and life coach who speaks, writes, and coaches about the power and joy of embracing life after fifty. She is married to the man of her dreams and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah near her eight grown children and four beautiful grandchildren.