skin deep

Our skin cells rejuvenate every seven years!

It's one of those old wives tales that has spread like a virus and ends up toted around in our culture's back pocket. I have always been quite fond of it, even though it's easily disproven by the need to wash one's sheets and replace one's bed pillow thanks to an excess of crusty, old skin flakes taking up residence.

There's a huge power in the number seven! It has meanings of perfection, luck and good fortune on the one hand and broken mirror misfortune, bankruptcy stains, and itchy marital inclinations on the other. There are seven deadly sins and notably seven musical notes. This number is so round, complete, and encompassing.

So, why wouldn't the outer shell of our bodies approach a new paint job every seven years? It's got a beautiful poetry to it. The truth in it would allow us to enter new chapters of our saga every seven years, ridding ourselves of much of what had come before and becoming refreshed and ready for the battles ahead. Having just passed my thirty-fifth birthday, I could likewise find myself prime real estate for just the right make-over to head into my forties with, revved up and contemplating the frivolous purchase of that '74 Ford Cortina from Life on Mars that would be the closest I could come to mid-life stereotyping.

I still believe it.

I just don't believe it on the literal level. I do feel that our internal emotionally sordid, spiritually dimwitted, aesthetically grotesque selves spruce up over time and are in foreign lands within that time frame. Allow me a hot moment to picture myself in 2005, or in 1998, or perhaps 1991, or how about in 1984, or zooming along that Wet-N-Wild picture show that was the birth canal.

Well, maybe not the latter.

Each and every pace along that trail is distinctive to me, and set to very specific music and overtones. It doesn't matter if you believe in literal, well-timed shedding. I feel what's important is that you look inside yourself, and find something to grow from every time you venture.

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