Forever Young: How I Learned to Stay Young Without Expensive Face Creams

I was turning forty. it didn't seem so much different to being thirty nine, except i was no longer able to say I was in my thirties (somewhere between 28 and 38) and now I was in my forties, (somewhere between 78 and 100).

So, bought a Porsche, tried to have sexual relations (thanks Bill for the new language) with people half my age and went into hysteria about my appearance. I didn't evolve well. And nature made me pay for it.

I had plenty of support on this resistance to evolving. I lived in NYC and there were sexy gyms, beauty salons, men's wear shops, and a plethora of relatively poor, stunningly attractive young women who had come to NYC to become an overnight success, weren't and needed a sugar daddy. At the time I thought it was love, but alas again, nature tapped me on the shoulder, Evolve.. and I resisted with all my ego could muster (a lot)

To help with my resistance to nature's call to evolve, I blocked my ears, mind, heart and eyes to the signs the wiser alternatives, and between yoga classes, gym work outs with mirrors, bedroom gymnastics and Viagra, I added time for facial treatments at such delicious venues as Aveda and others with names like "You Are Amazing and Young if you come inside" - (the real names elude me and fading memory is part of aging process).

Evolve nature turned up the dial, I put on a few kilos around my belly in spite of twenty hours a week in yoga and gym classes, and eating like a baby rabbit.

To help fight nature's message, and armed with my Amex card, dressed in designer jeans and with my $200 gay salon hair cut, I visited Heavenly Heavens "De Wrinkle Shop" to turn back the clock (at least on my face) and be rubbed, scrubbed, pampered and have an untold number of zits and blackheads removed from my nose and chin.

To my horror, I had a small mountain of hairs plucked from my nose. I knew people with less hair on their head than I had harvesting in my nose. And hairs in my ears? Goodness me, was there another Amazon in there?

I also had my eyebrows shaved with a road sweeper and clogged pours dealt with using a jack hammer. But this was nothing to worry about really, because the whole time I was there, I was being looked at admiringly (how did they do that without puking) by a stunning, delicious, sexy, young woman, with qualifications that sounded like a NASA scientist but were really one day seminars at the local night school clinic.

The beauty ladies, princess' from the feel younger heavens, would swoon over me, dote on me and make me feel and look, way younger than my years, all in a few hours. I had, I thought, found a way around evolve.... but, I was wrong.

I walked out of those places so damn happy and looking so young I had to show my I.D at the bar to get a drink. Which of course was the problem because it was the drink in a sleazy smoky bar that turned my expensive new baby face back into something resembling the surface of the moon in three hours.

I'd get home half pissed from too many margaritas at the local still carrying my brown paper, designer carry bag with "Another Wood-duck" neatly emblazoned on it, and dive into that fancy bag full of bottles of Elixr that had cost me six times more than the facial. (enter the realization about how the beautiful young women were motivated not to puke as they desludged my face -commission on product sales)

I'd pour another scotch as a nightcap and get to work trying to reproduce at home what a stunningly beautiful, highly motivated woman had done to the backdrop sounds of rainforest waterfalls in the "heavenly clinic" - As you'll see, I failed.

First the exfoliant. A liquid I found more akin to the smell of a bad vodka in an Indonesian bar. I'd take out one of the 10 face wipes I'd paid more for than a pair of Armani undies and proceed to "gently cleanse and prepare" which in my language translated to soak the cloth in as much of that foul stuff and scrub the bejesus out of my face.

The intent was to awaken my skin for a refreshing next step. Instead, my face turned as red as butt after a whack from my ever worried father back when I was a kid" I guess that was at least one association I got to being young again.

What came off on this scouring process was incomprehensible - absolute Black....? Black? It looked like the make up I had to remover after playing one of the hay slinging, toting that bale chorus in Oaklahoma the musical.

Cripes, I'd say to myself, where'd this crud come from? It was only 3 -5 hours since I'd left the "forever young" facial shop.

Then the second shock, "I looked forty again"..

What came to pass was the realization that the youthful look on my face when leaving that salon that had cost me more than a 6 week holiday in the Bahamas, was more about the fact that I'd stopped worrying for an hour than any cream could offer.

Evolveyabastard - Experience is a crappy teacher.

I spent a fortune to realize I didn't need to spend a fortune.

Ponds cold cream costs $3.00 a bucket and good old dove soap at $1 is as effective on skin as any product, and that the real secret to staying young was the ability to stop worrying and stay happy.

A clean shirt and a good attitude could almost guarantee I'd never feel old again. So, I diecided to learn how to relax, stop worry and wash my shirts... here's my evolve realisations around staying forever young:

1. I'm as young as I feel and the worst thing I can feel is fat, lazy and immobile. So, I've absolutely got to, should, need to, want to, desire to, choose to and love to exercise to a burning sweat every day for a minimum of 20 minutes - and most important I change my activity if I'm not in love with it. Right now it's kayaking, but, if I stop loving it, I would take up pole dancing or whatever made me smile.

2. I must have some sort of spiritual practice (mine is natures universal laws) in order to see order in the chaos to calm my worries. I think a lot about a lot. I worry about global warming, starving children, violence, drugs, the disconnect with corporate executives and nature. If I don't have a process to put peace in my heart I am going to age at the rate of a formula 1 grand prix race car tyre... and probably look the same too. That's why I use and teach the laws of nature. Peace of mind.

3. I need a purpose in my life, something productive to do every day that stimulates my brain. Nobody beats me up more than me. I think we're all the same in this regard, we're all pretty hard on ourselves and that self diminishing stuff is really a short cut to the grave. And yet, I don't want to become good old Ego Chris like before and fight off nature to the point where she screams Evolve again... (ouch) so, instead of thinking "what's best for me" I think, "what's best for the purpose of my life" It's been the single greatest miracle in my life and has knocked about 30 years off my head and heart space... A purpose greater than me has got me out of me.

4. I love sex, frequently (used to be twice a day but now just once) in order to keep the fire in my belly burning. I know a lot of readers will claim this is trite and trivial but I've never felt older, more wrinkled, stuck or more dispirited than when I've gone through a long dry spell of sex withdrawal or, been in a relationship where the sexy part dried up. I've got mates who are married who haven't had sex since last Christmas - or their birthday... cripes they are older than King Tut, bored, boring and often workaholics. My advice to them when I couch execs who overwork? Go home have sex. (I mean great, tantric, loving, long delicious sex.. not wham bam good night sex)

5. And the final key, I have to be out in nature at least 3 hours a day. I think this is why the word is so commercial, consumer addicted and environmentally ignorant.. we are too much indoors. We've moved from 100% nature outdoors dependent to 100% indoors, synthetic dependent just in the past 100 years. No wonder we're in a mess, we just haven't evolved as humans as fast as our technology has. Nature is saying to the whole city life, EVOLVE but technology is accelerating and we're not. Being outdoors three hours a day, and making my home, work and family time an outdoors experience is the last, but most important step in my Forever Young strategy because this puts my life, love, heart, soul, mind and body in a loving state of youthful invigoration. And that for me is the secret to eternal youth.. Well at least preventing the age clock getting ahead of me.

I'm now 58, still paddle kayaks in the ocean, climb mountains in Nepal, love women, have plenty of energy and feel younger than I did at forty, so, it's working.

Chris Walker http://www.chriswalker.com.au/ offers a real life, everyday, raw and nature based awareness that helps people live from the inside out. It opens hearts from past challenges, frees vision, inspiration and life purpose and gives rise to true human potential in all the seven areas of life. Innerwealth is also a process, a process that helps people deal with everyday challenges, tap their intuitive nature and live, in a sense, guided from within. A leaders edge, a lovers heart. There are twenty books in the Innerwealth Series, including Sacred Love and Innerwealth, plus "the Laws of Nature for Better Relationships" weekly blogs and podcasts. Chris Walker also runs consultations, interventions and seminars on Innerwealth at work and at home. http://www.chriswalker.com.au/

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How iPod and iTunes Have Forever Changed the Music Industry - A Musician's Perspective

In college, I once took a course - "Music and Society". One of the things we discussed in the class was the iPod and its effects on how we listened to music, and how it influenced artists. Now, this was back in 2006 when iPod wasn't quite as ubiquitous as it is today (though by all notions, it was already massively popular enough to warrant such a class). In the past 5 years, Apple has not only added to the iPod's millions of fans, but also invented the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

The iPod, as any purist will tell you, is bad for music. For one, the idea of buying single tracks instead of albums distils the sense of continuity and overall thematic concepts that tie an album together. An album like The Who's 'Tommy' would never work in the age of the iPod. Listening to individual tracks from Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" seems to be an exercise in futility since the entire effect of the album is lost when the tracks are played in isolation. What the iPod has managed to do is create 'one track artists' who thrive on singles. Lady Gaga wouldn't be Lady Gaga without the iPod. Neither would someone like Weird Al Yankovic sell millions of individual tracks.

Further, the iPod has changed the way musicians go about creating music. While Pink Floyd sat down with a vision of a complete, thematically coherent album, modern day artists think more in terms of individual tracks. It doesn't matter if the tracks in the album flow into each other. After all, the songs will be heard in isolation, individually. Whatever efforts you might take to create a thematic structure will be lost, so why even try?

From a musician's perspective, is it a good thing? Perhaps. It makes for easier song writing. It means you can create one awesome song and hope to cash in. It means you no longer need to release entire albums. Rather, you can go about on a track by track basis - release one track as soon it is perfected, cash in, use that money to party and fund your next track.

But at the same time, it means that musicians who want to experiment, branch out, and incorporate sounds and instruments that they can't possibly fit into one track will feel a little lost. Musicians with strong lyrics who pride in spinning stories around their tracks would feel irrevocably lost, since an individual track can only afford a limited canvas to paint their images on. Guitarists who want to explore a certain sound may feel limited by the constraints on time a 4 minute track binds them in. For the dedicated, sincere, experimental musician, the arrival of the iPod means that the purity and storytelling zest of the earlier generation is lost. It also means that we will never have an album like 'Dark Side of the Moon' or 'The Wall' (both by Pink Floyd) again. 'The Wall', for instance, was released with a full length movie based on the tracks. Something like that could never happen in this era of singles.

One very positive development has sprung from the advent of the iPod however which has revolutionized how music is created and listened to. As a musician, it is something I'm immensely ecstatic about: the iTunes music store. The iTunes music store has the potential to completely change the way musicians have traditionally created music. How? Allow me to explain:

Traditionally, as an artist, you went on stage, performed your songs, built up a fan base, toured, and if you were lucky, talented, and had that little 'X' factor, you would be spotted by some talent scout. Before long, you would be produced before a record company executive, who would wave a heavily biased (in the company's favor) contract before you. As a broke artist hungry for mainstream success, you would, of course, take whatever they would throw at you, perhaps remembering how even the Beatles had to contend with getting paid just 1 cent for every record sold (and that 1 cent was split among the four of them).

Over time, as your clout on the music industry increased, you could negotiate your contract and get the company to agree to more favorable terms that granted you more artistic freedom and monetary rewards. Madonna in the 1980s, for instance, could get the record company to agree to whatever terms she wanted. Nirvana could walk out of any contract and dictate terms to the company. That's how things were always done for decades: the young artist got screwed, worked hard, came up the ranks and finally became big enough to work according to his own rules.

Now in walked the iPod and the iTunes store. Within a decade, the iPod would go on to become almost as common as, well, a mobile phone. Everyone I know owns an iPod/iPhone/iPod Touch. All of them have access to the iTunes store where they can purchase any track they want with a single touch. Billions of tracks are downloaded from the iTunes store every year and Apple generates a significant portion of its revenues from it.

What the iTunes, in conjunction with the iPod/iPhone has managed to do is create an army of consumers who can discover and purchase any track they want within seconds. For the artist, it means that they entire discovery, supply, distribution side of the business that was typically controlled by record companies is democratized. The artist doesn't need to create physical CDs. Nor does he need to worry about marketing blitzes, supplying the CDs to stores, negotiating prices, etc. Any artist, be it Kanye West or the neighborhood band, could put up his tracks online for sale. And here's the best part: you may be Jay-Z, but the finest track from your latest album will sell for the same price as that wedding band from New Jersey: $0.99.

This means that an artist can today afford to release a track, sell thousands of copies, make a nice little bundle of money, then hit the road, perform in a few pubs, record another song, put it up on iTunes, sell another 50,000 copies, and repeat the process endlessly. It means that you can finally make music as a freelancer: releasing tracks as and when they are completed and using the money earned from each track to fund further tracks. When you have 8-10 decent songs, you could perhaps release them together as an album. Think of it as the patronage system under which writers and artists flourished in the 16th century, but only instead of feudal lords and ladies, you patrons would be ordinary fans.

Of course, this is still a rather utopian idea. Only an already popular band with millions of existing fans can get away with such an approach. Radiohead can afford to do this, and so can U2. But the local indie band probably won't build up enough buzz to sell thousands of singles, no matter how good they might be. It isn't difficult to foresee though, that 10-15 years down the line, no one would need record companies, and unknown bands could break through and make a tidy sum through a handful of songs. Will it be enough to buy private jets, ballrooms filled with champagne, fast Italian cars, and live life like a rock star? Probably not. But will it be enough to fund great music? Definitely yes.

The future of the music industry looks bright. All thanks to the iPod.

As an audiophile, I regularly review the latest wireless speakers, blog about breaking news from the audio hardware world, and introduce beginners to the hobby of Hi-Fi. You can read more of my articles on my site:

WirelessSpeakersHub.com

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