You get up every morning at six and run five miles.
For breakfast, you have fresh berries, yogurt and green tea.
At lunch you have a hair appointment to get rid of your grays and the following week another appointment for microdermabrasion.
Your medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy/department store beauty counter full of anti aging vitamins and beauty creams.
At night, you do a thousand crunches and some light yoga stretches before heading off to bed at 10 pm.
You do all this because your desire to look younger is strong.
And so is your vanity.
Wanting to look younger and all the activities you do to achieve that goal is vanity.
Dying your hair, slathering on beauty creams, doing sit-ups and even dieting, all are vain.
But when I use the words "vanity" and "vain" to describe your efforts to look younger, I'm not talking about being shallow or self-centered although I know a lot of people who fully subscribe to that belief.
When I say that wanting to look younger is vanity, I mean it is something trivial, worthless and pointless; futile would also be a good word here.
It is futile because wanting to look young is a desire that focuses mainly on the outside.
When you concentrate all your anti aging efforts on your outside appearance eventually you will fail.
Why? Because it has little or no effect on the mind.
Wanting to be young and live in a perpetual state of youthfulness is a desire that goes way beyond one's looks deep into the heart and mind.
It's a want that defies the natural order of things, the natural progression of time, and that's what makes this desire so powerful, its defiance.
Defiance is power because to defy something, anything is to challenge its very existence.
It is this challenging of ingrained beliefs that begins a progression in the mind of impossibility to probability.
When the mind begins to bend towards the possible and away from the impossible flashes of ideas and ingenuity begin to take shape.
The stronger your defiance towards a belief system the stronger your ability to dispel it.
And the aging process is no exception.
Without defiance, you will never reach true agelessness.
The absence of defiance is acceptance and acceptance of the aging process in the mind is a sure fire way to thwart any anti aging efforts on the outside.
To set your plan in motion to achieve a veritable state of youthfulness, change your desire from outward to inward.
Don't just want to look young, want to be young.
Don't be vain, be defiant.