There was a message there in the mirror this morning. Did you see it? It must have been a strange experience for Marcus Aurelius the first time he saw it…waking up, looking at his reflection, and noticing his hair turning gray. Feeling his body creak. Looking at the crows feet at the corners of his eyes and the wild hairs jutting this way and that in his eyebrows. Even for someone who had so actively practiced and meditated on the idea of memento mori, it would have been a rather vivid reminder to him that he was getting older, that each day a little more life left him, never to return.

“The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind too—and there’s nothing you can do about it,” writes Mary Laura Philpont in her book Bomb Shelter. “You can’t hold onto anything, even your own face, which makes it awfully insulting that you have to look at it all the time. But maybe that’s the job of our faces, to help us get used to letting go.”

In fact, a lot of things in life can do this job. Seneca tells us of the rude awakening he had one day, visiting a family estate and noticing the trees he had planted as a young man were dying…of old age.

We can talk philosophically about time and age all we want. But they’ll mean very little if we ignore the incontrovertible proof that life gives us about these very ideas. It matters little if we wrestle with our mortality on the page while we deny the reality of what is shining back at us in the mirror.

We are on a one-way train, and we are not in control of where it stops. We can’t fool ourselves with expensive creams (or surgeries). Because no amount of dyes or hair pieces will change the urgency of what we need to learn how to accept…and then let go of.