The first time I saw my daughter on the ultrasound screen, the gynecologist said to me with a half smile: “Here you are. It is a perfect parasite. You will be her refuge, her food and her protection until she can fend for herself. Instinctively and automatically, my whole being was already passionately involved in that role: my immune system, my glucose levels, my heartbeat and, of course, my entire brain, watered by hitherto unknown waves of hormones that they served the little being that was within me. It was life, which was imposed by force, with amazing precision and efficiency. It seemed to me a disturbing moment, but extraordinary.
People's lives are constantly marked by similar stages, accompanied by precise and automatic physiological changes. For years, these evolutionary stages of life, including birth, puberty, the parenting stage, and maturity, rule automatically and powerfully. But we do not celebrate them all: the parameter by which we decide which ones are welcome is that of evolutionary utility, blatantly based on physical youth, that is, on sexual attractiveness and fertility. This altar to biological youth implies hurtful contempt for the transformation of people throughout their lives.
The tyranny of age is a deep and deep-seated prejudice, based on that clamorous evolutionary instinct. They don't let us age creatively and fully. Society reflects a shameful and diminished image of the stages of maturity. And since expectations are often fulfilled as a prophecy, many people enter with shame and fear in those stages of life.
The passage to maturity is something relatively new: at the beginning of the 20th century, the average life span was around forty-nine years. Few of us had the chance to reinvent ourselves as unique and independent beings regardless of the evolutionary role that nature endowed us with, billions of years ago. When can we celebrate any stage like we celebrate the first job, a wedding, a birth and any of the fundamental chapters that accompany us along our way?
It is not just age: changes in work, perspective, attitude, partner ...
All of them are increasingly frequent changes in a more liquid society, which invites us to live several lives in one. Celebrating any stage is a way of integrating it, of accepting that we are in constant transformation, that any change can bring us something good.
Celebrate your achievements and your rites of passage, your stage changes, small and large, because they allow you to open new doors, discover new worlds.
"Hopefully your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears".
Nelson Mandela