Wearing Time Like Jewelry, One Scar at a Time

I buy anti-aging cream while seeking advice from elderly neighbors.

This contradiction lives in every interaction with older people—simultaneously respecting their wisdom while spending money to avoid looking like them. We honor age in others while fighting it in ourselves.

The elderly imam at our mosque speaks with authority earned through decades of study and experience. I listen to his counsel with genuine reverence, appreciating the depth that only comes from living through multiple generations of human folly and triumph. His wrinkled face, his slow movements, his gravelly voice—all evidence of the time required to accumulate what he knows.

But afterward, I examine my face in the mirror for new lines, as if the wisdom I just received came at too high a cost. As if I could somehow extract the benefits of his experience without accepting the visible markers that experience creates.

We live in a culture that worships youth while desperately needing the guidance that only age provides. We want elderly people to exist—to teach us, counsel us, show us how to navigate life’s complexity. But we don’t want to become them. We want the benefits of experience without the evidence of having gained it through time.

Every advertisement for anti-aging products implicitly argues that looking old is a failure, a problem to be solved, evidence of insufficient vigilance. Meanwhile, we celebrate elderly mentors, revere aging spiritual leaders, seek out older colleagues for their institutional knowledge. The message is incoherent: aging is simultaneously something to respect and something to prevent.

What if aging gracefully means accepting that looking wise and looking young are mutually exclusive? The lines on the imam’s face aren’t incidental to his wisdom—they’re evidence of it. Each wrinkle represents years of observation, each gray hair marks time spent learning, each slowed movement reflects decades of accumulated experience.

When I apply cream to prevent those same markers, I’m essentially saying: I want wisdom without its visible proof. I want to benefit from time passing while appearing untouched by time. I want the depth that comes from living while maintaining the surface of not having lived.

The contradiction reveals our deepest fear about aging: not that we’ll lose capability, but that we’ll lose value. In a culture that equates youth with worth, visible aging becomes visible devaluation. We respect elderly individuals for their specific wisdom while unconsciously absorbing the message that looking elderly makes you less valuable.

So we perform this strange dance—seeking guidance from aged faces while paying to keep our own faces from revealing age, honoring the wisdom years bring while desperately trying to hide the years themselves, wanting to be experienced without looking like we’ve experienced anything.

Perhaps the real grace in aging isn’t accepting wrinkles—it’s accepting the incoherence of wanting wisdom without its physical manifestation. It’s recognizing that every time we respect an elderly person’s insight while fighting our own aging, we’re participating in a cultural delusion: that we can have everything experience offers without any evidence that we’ve gained it.

The imam’s authority comes partly from his appearance—we trust his wisdom because his face shows he’s lived long enough to acquire it. If he looked thirty, we’d question whether he really understood what he claimed to know. His visible age validates his invisible knowledge.

Yet I spend money to prevent my face from offering that same validation. I want people to trust my judgment, but not because I look like I’ve lived. I want the benefits of appearing experienced and appearing young simultaneously—an impossibility I’m willing to pay for monthly.

What if we stopped fighting the evidence of living? What if wrinkles became marks of honor rather than problems to solve? What if gray hair signaled depth rather than decline? The culture won’t change just because individuals accept their aging. But perhaps acceptance starts there—recognizing the absurdity of respecting age while refusing to look aged, of seeking wisdom while hiding time’s passage, of wanting everything age offers except visibility.

The anti-aging cream sits on my bathroom shelf next to my phone with the imam’s number saved for when I need guidance. The contradiction is complete, daily, unresolved. I honor age while fighting it, respect time’s gifts while denying its marks, seek wisdom while hiding its evidence.

Maybe aging gracefully means recognizing this incoherence without necessarily resolving it—accepting that we live in contradiction, wanting both youth’s appearance and age’s depth, knowing we can’t fully have either while we fight for both.