As I sat exam marking this year, I listened to songs which people had posted on YouTube.  One band which popped up was Of Monsters and Men, and one of my favourite songs on their album is called 'Your Bones'. Now, I do have this tendency when listening to music to pick up on some of the lyrics and build a story out of it, so I don't always take in all of the words for quite some time.   Basically, I'm saying that the title alone and the mention of bones and a body within the song played over and over in my mind.  This will be important later.  Unless it isn't.  Who knows with the way I wander around my own thought-processes.  

At about the same time, a colleague mentioned a documentary she had watched about some ship or other (a famous one - my WordCloud mate Daedalus would know, I am sure) from the time of bows and arrows. She mentioned that the bodies of archers had been discovered and that parts of their arm/shoulder were worn down from the repeated actions of drawing a bow.  

This hit the bit of my brain which has watched a lot of episodes of Bones, and the bit which was recycling 'Your Bones' on a ten minute basis, and ran up against a lot of posts I had been reading on the internet about the beauty industry and its unrealistic standards.  I'll be honest - it also smashed right into my own fears about looking older.  

What is boils down to (lots of bashing and boiling here, but we can always analyse my lexis later), is that I have been mulling over this bizarre feeling we have in our society that our bodies should not, under any circumstances, reflect our lives.

We have to keep them pristine and pretend we haven't used them.  Unless it is to be tanned (to the right level, of course, predetermined by some committee, no doubt, who live in a sacred potted palm stump in the foyer of a tanning salon) or to show evidence of working out.  Again, only to the right degree.  Other than that, though, you pretty much have to leave no surface impression at all that you have ever done anything or, you know, existed in time.  

WHY?

What are we gaining?  We rush to be old enough to look 'grown-up' (Which I suspect most adults realise is a lie, anyway.), and then we hit the brakes, dig our heels in, and attempt to stay at that point forever.  Perhaps part of the problem is in the term 'grown-up'.  By its very phrasing, it implies there is a stopping point, a stage we reach where we are ourselves, complete and finished.  

Not once did any TV show or magazine tell me I would start to get lines and wrinkles whilst the sodding spots were still turning up!  Not even a few years without either?  Really, life?  I couldn't just have a bit of time?

I certainly don't think I ever turned into the 'final' and 'real' me at any point.  Very much a Work in Progress, here.  

This is something people do in many areas, if not all.  Nostalgia?  Largely a feeling that some fixed point in time was 'perfect' and everything since has been a degeneration.  Please.  The great Golden age never existed.  You know some of the things the greats of Ancient Athens and the Roman Republic wrote about?  How the youth of today are awful and standards are slipping; it was all better when they were boys.  

We refuse to admit that time is always shifting on, pulling and pushing us with it, and that our physical selves will show our lives.  They are maps, really - scrapbooks.  Some of us might feel more like we are only scraps of what we used to be, sometimes, when we try that karate move we used to be able to manage and something pulls, and I am not suggesting we all gleefully coat ourselves in giant knitted cardigans and tea-cosy hats (I am going to start stocking up on those soon, so my mum has a good supply to wear.  See, I do listen when you tell me your future plans, mum.), but clinging by our fingernails to the way we imagine we looked in our early twenties, hiding any wear and tear from whatever we have done in life, is pointless.  And it causes a lot of unnecessary stress.

I wish I could say that this thought will lead me to march out, head held high and all that, with total confidence that how I look now is fine.  It won't.  I'm far too happy when people mistake me for 22 (Seriously, and only a month or two ago.  I think it was the Skyrim t-shirt which did it.), and I am far too self-conscious about what I look like to be able to pull this off with the ultimate conviction I wish I had.  

Still, I am going to try to bear in mind that life is a process.  It's a series of experiences and transitions, not one pristine state and a lot of time spent lapsing from that.  Anyway, I love the idea of my life-story being written on my bones, hidden away inside my flesh.  It's the sort of delicious image which makes me smile - metaphorical and borderline-creepy.  Lovely.