The Map of Our Years

I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning, tracing the faint, jagged scar on my thumb from a kitchen accident years ago. It is such a small thing, but it holds the memory of a frantic Tuesday and a dull knife perfectly. We spend so much of our youth trying to smooth out our edges, hiding the marks that life leaves on us, as if being unblemished is the same thing as being whole. But looking at that scar, I realized it is really just a map. Every line on our skin, every crease around our eyes, tells a story of a day we survived or a laugh we couldn’t contain. We are not meant to stay pristine. We are meant to be worn, like a favorite book with a broken spine or a stone smoothed by the river. What if we stopped trying to erase the evidence of our own history and started seeing it as the only proof that we were truly here?

Ryszard Wierzbicki has captured this beautiful, honest truth in his image titled Oldness. It is a gentle reminder that our stories are written on our faces for the world to see. Does your own reflection tell a story you are proud of?