02/08/2026
The Twinkle in Her Eye
There is a lady who comes to my T’ai Chi class who has the most wonderful twinkle in her eye.
She has a ready smile, enjoys a laugh and there is a warmth about her that makes you instinctively warm to her.
If someone asked me to describe the perfect grandmother, or perhaps the sort of mum everyone would like to have, I think she would fit the bill perfectly.
Which is actually rather cheeky of me, because she is only about twelve years older than I am.
But there is something about her.
Something warm.
Something safe.
Something that makes you feel that life has probably been lived around her kitchen table.
I knew none of her story when she first came through my door.
She didn't tell me.
Another student had encouraged her to come along to T’ai Chi, and it was through that person that I eventually learnt that she had lost her husband.
They had been two halves of the same coin.
I don't know all the details of their life together, nor do I need to.
What stayed with me was the thought of those two halves.
To share your life with someone for years, to raise a family, to build all those ordinary days together that don't seem particularly important while you are living them — and then one day to find yourself carrying on without the person who had always been beside you.
Yet she never walked into my class carrying her loss for everyone to see.
She walked in with a twinkle in her eye.
And it made me wonder.
How much do we ever really know about another human being?
Beauty is often said to be in the eye of the beholder.
But what exactly are we beholding?
A face?
A body?
Smooth skin?
Youth?
Or something else entirely?
Because sometimes when I look at this lady, I can almost see the young woman she must once have been.
Not because her face suddenly changes.
Something else happens.
Perhaps she laughs.
Perhaps there is a mischievous expression.
Perhaps it is simply the way her eyes light up.
And for the briefest moment the years seem to disappear.
There she is.
The young woman.
The wife.
The mother.
The woman who fell in love.
The woman who had dreams she hadn't yet lived.
The woman who couldn't possibly have known everything life would eventually ask of her.
Of course, she hasn't really disappeared at all.
She is still there.
She has always been there.
The outer shell has simply changed around her.
Perhaps that is one of the strange things about growing older.
Other people see our age.
We still feel our life.
They see the face we have today.
We carry every face we have ever had.
Somewhere inside the woman of eighty is the girl of eight, the young woman of eighteen, the mother holding her baby, the wife laughing with her husband, and every version of herself that existed between then and now.
We don't discard those people as we age.
We carry them with us.
Along with everything they experienced.
The happiness.
The mistakes.
The adventures.
The ordinary Tuesday afternoons.
The people we loved.
And the people we had to learn to live without.
Perhaps that is why judging beauty by the outer shell has always seemed inadequate to me.
It tells us so little about the person standing in front of us.
During more than forty years of teaching, thousands of people have walked through my door.
Some arrive talking before they have even taken their coat off.
Others quietly find somewhere at the back.
Some smile.
Some appear nervous.
Some are confident.
And some you are simply drawn to.
I have often wondered why.
We make judgements about people remarkably quickly, based upon the tiny part of themselves they show us.
But behind every face is a story we cannot see.
We all have our barriers.
There is the person we present to the world and the person we protect inside.
Sometimes those barriers are built from fear.
Sometimes disappointment.
Sometimes grief.
Sometimes they are simply the result of living.
And perhaps we should remember that when we encounter one another.
The person who seems unfriendly may be frightened.
The quiet person may have spent a lifetime being overlooked.
The person laughing beside us may have cried that morning.
And the lady with the twinkle in her eye may have loved someone so deeply that losing him changed the shape of her world.
Yet still she smiles.
Not because what happened didn't matter.
Perhaps because it mattered enormously.
And she has chosen to continue living.
I find myself thinking more about ageing these days.
Not with dread.
More with curiosity.
The face in the mirror changes.
Skin that was once smooth develops lines.
Hair changes.
Bodies change.
And slowly the world begins to look at us differently.
There comes a point when society gives you a new label.
Old.
It is a remarkably small word in which to place an entire human life.
Because inside that box is everything.
Love affairs.
Babies.
Careers.
Arguments.
Holidays.
Bereavements.
Friendships.
Mistakes.
Triumphs.
Thousands upon thousands of ordinary mornings when someone simply got out of bed and carried on.
How can all of that possibly be reduced to old?
The world changes too.
It moves to a different beat from the one we knew in our youth.
And recently I have found myself trying to keep pace with a world that sometimes seems to be moving at a hundred miles an hour.
Technology changes almost before I have learnt how to use it.
Ways of working change.
Ways of communicating change.
Sometimes I would quite like the world to slow down while I catch up.
But it won't.
And I realised something.
The world doesn't mind if I stop.
It will simply continue without me.
If I decide that all of this belongs to younger people, there is a perfectly convenient box waiting for me too.
Old.
I can climb inside it whenever I choose.
But I don't intend to.
Perhaps my T’ai Chi has been preparing me for this all along.
For years I have taught people that when something changes, we don't become rigid and fight against it.
We soften.
We listen.
We feel the direction of movement.
We adjust.
And then we move.
We don't surrender our centre.
We don't allow ourselves to be swept away.
We simply learn how to move with what is happening around us.
I have taught that principle through movement thousands of times.
It has taken me rather longer to realise that it is also a very good way to grow older.
Move with change, but don't lose your centre.
I don't need to become young again.
I don't need to pretend to be someone I am not.
But neither do I need to stop growing simply because I have accumulated a certain number of birthdays.
A plant doesn't stop needing nourishment because it is mature.
We don't look at a tree that has stood for seventy years and say, "You've had your share of sunlight."
It still needs water.
It still needs light.
It still needs nourishment.
And when spring comes, the old tree does something quite extraordinary.
It grows new leaves.
Perhaps we need to do the same.
We need friendship.
Movement.
Laughter.
Purpose.
Curiosity.
Challenges.
People.
New ideas.
We need reasons to remain interested in tomorrow.
Because perhaps the real danger of growing older isn't the changing face in the mirror.
It is allowing the person behind it to stop growing.
And that brings me back to the lady in my class.
The woman with the ready smile.
The woman I once thought would make the perfect grandmother before remembering that she isn't actually that much older than me.
The woman who loved and raised a family.
The woman who found her other half and then had to discover how to live when half of that coin was no longer there.
She probably has no idea that she made me think about any of this.
I have never told her.
Perhaps one day I will.
Because when I look at her, I don't see an old lady.
I see layers.
I see the woman she is.
I catch glimpses of the young woman she was.
And behind both, I sense all the other versions of herself that I will never know.
Most of all, I see that twinkle.
And perhaps I finally understand what I was trying to say when I began thinking about beauty.
Beauty isn't the absence of lines on a face.
Perhaps the lines are part of it.
They tell us that somebody has been here.
That they have participated.
That they have loved.
That they have laughed.
That life has occasionally knocked them sideways.
That they have lost.
That they have carried on.
And, somehow, through all of it, something inside has remained capable of sparkling.
Maybe that is the beauty we should be looking for in one another.
And perhaps in ourselves.
We cannot prevent the years from changing the person the world sees.
But we can continue nourishing the person the world cannot see.
We can remain curious.
We can keep moving.
We can keep learning.
We can love.
We can lose.
We can begin again.
And when the rhythm of life changes, as it inevitably will, we can soften, listen and find a way to move with it.
Without losing our centre.
Without disappearing into the box marked old.
Still participating.
Still growing.
Still putting out new leaves.
And, if we are fortunate, no matter how many years eventually appear upon our faces...
still with a twinkle in our eye.
