The Face Aging Process

The Face Aging Process

 Face aging begins as early as in the twenties, 

The twenties

In your twenties, your fibroblasts (cells deep within the skin) are in optimum conditions, continuing to produce new collagens (proteins) and elastins (substances to give elasticity to the skin) to support your skin. Your sweat and oil glands keep your skin moist and lubricated. The blood in your tissues gives your skin a healthy glow. Even when you contract your facial muscles as you smile, the temporary folds vanish once you relax your facial muscles.

Your skin simply looks gorgeous and stunning! Continue to protect and maintain your skin before it is too late.

The late twenties

In your late twenties, superficial lines begin to appear on the forehead and at the corners of your eyes. Tiny blood vessels start to surface on your cheeks and your nose.

Your first wrinkles may appear around age 30—for some, even well before that.

The thirties

In your thirties, there is a slight drop in the renewal rate of your skin cells. The accumulation of dead skin cells makes your skin look less fresh and drier. You need to scrub your face more often to get rid of the dead skin cells.

Your fibroblasts become less active in producing collagens (proteins) to support your skin, which by now may look less resilient. Dynamic muscles due to muscle motion begin to form in the expression areas of your face. In your late thirties, the fat layer under the skin begins to thin out, creating slight hollows around your eyes, on your cheeks and your temples. Due to a lack of support of the skin, there is sagging around the eyes, on the cheeks, and along the jaw lines.

If you are a sun worshiper, you may have a crosshatched and cobble-stoned look on your face, folds at the corners of your lips, uneven skin texture, and pigmentation.

The forties

In your forties, the rate of skin aging accelerates due to the slower rate of skin cell renewal, the loss of fats, and the shrinkage of bones. In addition, gravity pulls your skin downward, lowering your eyebrows, and making the tip of your nose droop, too—thus changing the overall physical structure of your face. Such changes are gradual and almost unnoticeable to you, but maybe apparent to others. More obvious signs of aging continue to appear: bags under your lower eyelids; vertical lines between your eyebrows; and deep-set wrinkles on your forehead.

The damaging effects of photo aging from the sun have become more evident:

Formation of hyperkeratosis (raised spots of thicker skin)

Freckles becoming old spots

Skin texture turning tough and leathery

Formation of basal cells and even malignant melanoma cancer cells

The fifties

In your fifties, the physical structure of your face further diminishes due to continual loss of bone mass, elasticity, fat, moisture in your skin, as well as the gravitational pull.

Your face may assume a crinkled appearance: crosshatching on your cheeks; folds and wrinkles on your neck; deep-set lines around your mouth extending to your chin; vertical lines extending up from your lip line; drooping eyebrows and eyelids; and smaller as well as thinner lips.

The sixties

Your face may have become rectangular or trapezoid in shape.

Your cellular renewal rate has slowed down dramatically by as much as 50 percent, and your skin’s elasticity and volume reduce significantly, resulting in excess skin on your neck, your cheeks, and around your eyes and jaw lines. Now, you look undeniably old. The skin aging process will continue into your seventies, eighties, and nineties until the ultimate end.

Make yourself look younger and healthier for longer.

Nora Wise

Copyright© by Nora Wise

The Wisdom to Succeed

The Chinese Proverbs

"Do today's work, today." Traditional

"A kind man sees kindness, the wise man sees wisdom." Book of Changes

"Practice makes for true knowledge." Tuotuo

"Failure is the mother of success." Traditional

"Wanting to know everything is the worst of follies." Zhuang Zi

"To fare well, a man must trust in his feelings." Zhuang Zi

"Better to display your ugliness than to hide your ignorance." Traditional

To succeed, you must set your goals and then take your appropriate actions with no delay and no procrastination. Your knowledge must be focused, instead of diversified, while your emotions must be positive due to anticipated failures.

 Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Solving Money Problems

Solving Money Problems

Money plays a major role in life. You need money for almost everything in life. Given the importance of money, you need to know the basics of money—what money is all about.

In the past, people could enjoy the blessings of life without spending any real money. Nowadays, to many people, enjoyment of life requires money—and lots of it!

According to Buddha, craving or desire for material things is the source of all human miseries. Jesus also has this to say about money: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven.” (Luke 18:25)

So, what is the value of money? According to author Jonathan Swift, a wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart. 

More importantly, what does money mean to you?

Your perceptions of the value of money determine two of the most important things in your life: how you are going to live your life; how you are going to spend your money.

The value of money is based on your core values in life. One of the core values in life is integrity. Life, at any phase, is all about living—it comes with some hard work and simple integrity. Integrity is an important personal value, which has little to do with money. Integrity is an important value that the Creator has bestowed on each and every one of us, and its availability is the choice of an individual. Essentially, integrity is the value of what life has to offer, not the value of things that can be purchased with money. Your core values affect your attitudes toward money, including your financial priorities, financial decisions, and money management. So, what is the value of money to you?

Once you know the real value of money to you, you will know what to do with your money, and you will find the money you need.

Spending money is also an extremely important issue in life: throughout history, countries have become bankrupt, empires have collapsed, and families have broken up because of spending much too much money. So, spending money can affect positively or negatively your life, and can be a major stress factor.

Spending money has little to do with whether you have or you do not have much money. Spending money has to do with your attitude toward money. It has everything to do with the practical as well as the spiritual aspects of money and finance.

The practical aspect of spending money is that it may lead to debt—which is the source of financial stress. 

Why do people go into debt?

People go into debt for various reasons: deficit spending,  a result of buying things they don’t need with the money they don’t have; unforeseeable circumstances, due to exorbitant medical bills or loss of employment; personal choice, a consequence of reckless spending or buying on credit, bad investments, wrong financial decisions; ignorance, such as not knowing the meaning of APR or the implications  of “minimum  payments”  on credit cards, lack of knowledge of finance and money management; greed, leading to taking financial risks, or trying to get something for nothing. The list could go and on.

Don’t ever fall into the trap of “buy-now-and-pay-later”! Don’t run up your credit card debt. Consumer debt is the No.1 financial stress factor in life. Don’t let debt devastate your life. Don’t use a credit card if you don’t have control over spending; instead, use a debit card or a pre-paid credit card for the convenience of not carrying cash. Be careful when you use credit-card counseling services to get you out of debt, especially those so-called “non-profit” organizations. Just beware!

The spiritual aspects of spending money include being grateful and generous, as well as being a good steward.

Be grateful. God may have given you much less than others—or so you think! Remember, everything is relative. Maybe less is more: God has given you less so that you will have the incentive to make more.

You may have worked hard, but with little to show for it.  “You plant much but harvest little. You have scarcely enough to eat or drink and not enough to keep you warm. Your income disappears, as though you were putting it into pockets filled with holes.” (Haggai 1:6) Be grateful, instead of whining and complaining; put your time and effort on making money to live a debt-free life. More importantly, be generous with your money.

According to the biblical principle of money, God owns it all! You are but a steward of God’s money. Responsibilities of good stewardship include diligence, productivity, good time management, and self-discipline in matters of money. The money is not yours anyway. That is why you cannot take it with you when you are gone for good.

Stephen Lnd au

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

How to Avoid Human Conflicts

Balance and Harmony

The Way Through Human Conflicts

Human conflicts are many. The Way is the only way to go through them, rather than avoiding them.

Balance and harmony

Always maintain your internal balance and harmony. Remember, the world around you is always a reflection of what is deep inside you.

“The Way is easy,

yet people prefer distracting detours.

Beware when things are out of balance.

Remain centered within the Creator.

Distractions are many,

in the form of riches and luxuries.

They allure us from the Way.

Accumulations are like extortions of the poor.

They bring only disaster and suffering.

Do not deviate from the Way.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 53)

“When there is no desire to be someone that we are not,

separate from our true nature designed by the Creator,

all things are in perfect balance and harmony.” (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 37)

Five elements and natural cycle

The five elements of the ancient Chinese are: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth.

The five elements balance and complement one another to create both internal harmony and a natural cycle. To illustrate, water nourishes trees or wood; without wood, there will be no fire (which burns wood); without fire burning wood, there will be no earth (the ashes from the burnt wood); without earth, there will be no metal (from the earth itself); through condensation, fire heats metal to produce water; without metal, there will be no water; without water, there will be no tree or wood.

These five elements are interdependent on one another for their own existence in the form of a natural cycle. In many respects, human relationships and our dealings with one another attest to the cyclical nature of the world we are living in.

                                                      

TAO wisdom

Think about your own nature with reference to the five elements. Are you strong and independent like metal, bold and pioneering like wood, soft and flexible like water, fiery and passionate like fire, or nurturing and receptive like earth?

Also, think about the different natures of the people around you, or you have to deal with. Understanding their different natures may result in better and more harmonious relationships with them. Indeed, the five elements can give you profound wisdom and insight into many different life situations to help you avoid unnecessary everyday conflicts and disparities.

The bottom line: learn to live a life without any conflict and confrontation with others. To do just that, you need to know not only yourself but also others.

“Knowing others is intelligence.

Knowing ourselves is true wisdom.

Overcoming others is strength.

Overcoming ourselves is true power.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 33)

Everything will be in its natural place because everything follows a natural cycle. So why do you strain, stress, and strut yourself?

“We stay in the very center of the Creator,

and refrain from controlling our destiny.

Everything will evolve and fall into its natural place,

according to the laws of the Creator.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 37)

Soft and flexible

To help you overcome conflicts and resolve issues, you need the flexibility of TAO. Always be flexible, instead of being strong-willed and uncompromising.

“The Way is paradoxical.

Like water, soft and yielding,

yet it overcomes the hard and the rigid.

Stiffness and stubbornness cause much suffering.

We all intuitively know

that flexibility and tenderness

are the Way to go.

Yet our conditioned mind

tells us to go the other way.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 78)

It does not mean that you let people walk all over you and do nothing. Just step back, giving yourself some open space to create a detached mindset. If you are combative and strike back with a personal attack, you are in fact driving a nail into wood with a hammer; when you pull out the nail, the puncture on the wood is still there. So do not do anything that you may regret for the rest of your life. Always defer your anger for later processing.

All in all

Having good human relationship with others may not only afford you joy and happiness, but also heal you mentally, physically, and spiritually through your own connections with others. On the other hand, having bad human relationships may make you feel sad, lonely, hopeless, and depressed.

“If we are in harmony with the Creator,

we are like newborn babies,

in natural harmony with all.

Our bones are soft, and our muscles are weak,

but our grip is strong and powerful.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 55)

We are all living in a world of speed in which nothing seems to last too long, including human relationships. In contemporary living, there is too much focus on speed. Given that life is short, there is a great deal to be done and accomplished. As a result, you may feel the compression of time, and you may have developed a compulsive mind with a multi-tasking mindset, such as talking and texting on the phone while driving at the same time.

Remember, it is your compulsive mind that makes you feel distressed and unhappy. Ironically, it is because you know and believe that nothing lasts, that you want to do more, much more than necessary, hoping against hope that some of the things that you are doing may last a little longer. Because nothing lasts, so you begin to look for new ones to replace the ones that have expired. An example is a love relationship: if it does not turn out to be what you have expected, you just let it end itself, and then start looking for another one because it is your belief that nothing lasts.

According to TAO, truly nothing lasts, but that is the wrong way to look at the impermanence of things. The right way is to look at everything with non-attachment, which is letting go of whatever that happens in your life, be it joy or sorrow, success or failure, happiness or un-happiness. Letting go essentially means understanding that nothing lasts, and that what goes up must also come down, because everything in life follows a certain natural order—just like youth becoming old age, and life transforming into death. Understanding the impermanence of all things may change how you are going to live your life and interact with others. If nothing lasts, then let go of everything, and live your life to the fullest, which is in the present. The past was gone, so let it go; the future is yet to come, so let go of your expectations. Only the present is real, so live it to the fullest.

“Therefore, we focus on the present moment,

doing what needs to be done,

without straining and stressing.

To end our suffering,

we focus on the present moment,

instead of our expected result.

So, we follow the natural laws of things.”

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 63)

 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Aging and You

The passage of time is inevitable and eternal. Aging begins as early as from young adulthood (around age 20 to 40) to middle adulthood (around age 40 to 65), and continues to old age (beginning at the age of retirement, approximately at age 65). Aging occurs throughout most of lifespan. Such a process is an accumulation of changes, which may be subtle or even drastic, that progressively lead to disease, degeneration, and, ultimately, death. Truly, you cannot die merely of old age; your ultimate demise is caused by advancing age itself, as well as by the diseases and degenerative conditions that accompany it.

Aging is difficult to define, but you will know it when you see it or experience it yourself. In brief, aging is a steady decline in health, which is instrumental in shortening lifespan; and the aging process is the duration during which such changes occur.

The hard facts of aging

Whether you like it or not, your biological clock is ticking, and this will happen to various systems in your body:

Your heart will pump less blood, and your arteries will become stiffer and less flexible, resulting in high blood pressure—a health problem that often increases with age.

With less oxygen and nutrients from the heart, your lungs will become less efficient in distributing oxygen to different organs and membranes of your body.

Your brain size will gradually reduce by approximately 10 percent between the age of 30 and 70. Loss of short-term memory will become more acute.

Your bone mass will reduce, making it more brittle and fragile. Your body size will shrink as you lose your muscle mass.

Can the aging process be slowed down?

Absolutely! Although death has been pre-programmed into your biological organisms, you body cells, theoretically, may have an indefinite lifespan through division, rejuvenation, and regeneration—if they are still healthy and functional.

Although your genes mainly determine the speed of your biological clock, you can still slow down the speed of aging—if you still have good health.

So, what is good health? Is being healthy synonymous with absence of disease?

According to the United States Public Health Service, good health is “preventing premature death, and preventing disability, preserving a physical environment that supports human life, cultivating family and community support, enhancing each individual’s inherent abilities to respond and to act, and assuring that all Americans achieve and maintain a maximum level of functioning.” This statement probably sums up what you need to do in order to be younger and healthier for longer; it says everything about aging.

Younger and Healthier for Longer focuses on preventive and remedial measures you can take to slow down your own aging process in order to attain your goal to become younger and healthier for longer.

 This book is comprehensive in that it covers virtually all aspects of a healthy mind and body—the requisites for becoming younger and healthier for longer. They may be different for men and women in their different stages of their lives.

Life is a myriad of complex problems, which are often inter-related. This book provides you with different choices of solutions. Instead of getting old gracefully, why not mature youthfully?

Over the past decades, preventive medicine has become an important component of the health care system in the United States due to the rising cost of medical care and insurance coverage.

You need to develop your own preventive strategies to slow down, if not reverse, your own aging process. Nobody can do it for you. But, with the help of this book, YOU can do it for yourself.

Remember, each individual’s aging process is unique in itself. This is most evident when you go to your high school reunion: some may look incredibly young, while others may have added ten to fifteen years to their age. A high school or college reunion is often a time of awakening and reckoning to one’s aging process.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Anything Is Everything

What is meant by “anything is everything”?

It may have different meanings and different interpretations to different individuals.

First of all, human perceptions are subjective and individualized: they are affected not only by the five senses, but also by the unique experiences of an individual, as well as by the indelible memories of those experiences retained in the mind of that individual. Therefore, what is important to you may not be as important to others, and vice-versa. For this reason, anything could be everything to you, but not to others.

An illustration

Near the end of 2016, a road rage occurred in Arkansas that ended in the tragic death of a 3-year-old child. 

A woman, with her 3-year-old grandson sitting at the back of her car, stopped at a stop sign. A man in the car right behind honked her for not starting her car immediately, but the woman honked back; thus the road rage began with the man firing a gun shot at the back of the woman’s car.

Stopping too long at a stop sign, or wanting to get to a place on time might be everything to the man. Having the right to remain where she was might also be everything to the woman, so she naturally honked back.  

Unfortunately, that anything-is-everything incident ended in tragedy—the death of the woman’s three-year-old grandson being shot dead while sitting at the back of her car.

In real life, anything could be everything to real people—it all depends on their respective perspectives of anything is everything.

            

Another illustration

In 2012, a Chinese couple from Hong Kong filed a lawsuit against an education consultant in the United States for $2 million dollars, who promised that he could—but ultimately did not—get their two sons into Harvard University. 

The couple had used “improper” but maybe still perfectly “legal” means to get their two sons into Harvard University.

Getting into an elite college or university may be everything to many students, including their parents. Some might even resort to doing anything in order to achieve that goal, which is everything to them.

A similar illustration

A pastor from Hong Kong was invited to give a sermon in China. A woman from the congregation asked the pastor if it was “right” to give money to get her son into an elite school in China. The pastor replied by saying: “Your son getting into that elite school would also imply depriving another child of that same opportunity you are seeking for your child.”

A year later, the pastor met the same woman, who told him that her son had got into that elite school but without using her kwganxi or connection. The pastor then said to her: “See, God is in control; if you would just let Him.”

Now, what is your own take on “anything is everything”?

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

The TAO of a Good Marriage

The TAO of a Good Marriage

The rate of divorce is skyrocketing in the United States, and the U.S. Census estimates about half of marriages end in divorce.  According to relationship experts, the number of long-term relationships heading towards separation is now becoming more frequent with a longer life span and a growing acceptability of divorce by society. What some experts are saying is that people divorce because they have a longer lifespan, and that divorce is no longer a social taboo.

The following is taken from my book THE BOOK OF LIFE AND LIVING; it explains the pivotal role of spiritual wisdom in the success and survival of a marriage:

Marital relationships are complex and difficult.  due to the complexity and difficulty of interpersonal relationships.

To illustrate, when you take your marriage vows, you solemnly promise to love and care for your spouse “for better or for worse.” But that is a tall order in a marriage. Your marriage partner owes you a debt (or so you think!) if he or she falls short of your expectations. As a result, you become angry and resentful. Without God’s saving grace, you only see yourself as unforgiven and unacceptable to God; in turn, you become unforgiving and unaccepting towards your spouse. The outcome may be a divorce or, at best, an unhappy marriage.

Reflective Thought

Relationships are difficult and unpredictable: many prefer to wet their feet first before they jump into a marriage.

Case in Point

According to a recent study by the University of Denver, about 70 percent of couples co-habit before getting married.

Nowadays, many are afraid of getting married because they do not have sufficient faith either in themselves or in God.

Faith in marriage and living in faith hold the key to a successful marriage.

Not Knowing Self

Self-esteem is an important factor in a healthy love relationship. You must believe that you are “good enough” for your partner. True self-esteem stems from who you are, and not from what you do. If self-esteem were based on success, then many would indeed have low self-esteem because they would not be able to overcome the many hurdles of failures in their lives.

From the Christian point of view, self-esteem comes from the fact that you are made in the image of God.

“and have put on the new self who is being renewed to a true knowledge according to the image of the one Who created him.” Colossians 3:10

Therefore, God loves you, and you are as good as you can be.

From the TAO's point of view,  self-esteem means loving yourself completely for who you are, irrespective of what you like or dislike about yourself—or else you cannot love another person wholeheartedly. According to TAO wisdom, if you cannot accept something unpleasant or incomplete in yourself, you cannot accept something that you think is unpleasant or incomplete in another person. It is just that simple! If you reject that person, you are in fact rejecting a part of yourself that you do not like. In a love relationship, you often begin to “mask” what you do not like about yourself, hiding it from the person you love. You are afraid of opening yourself completely, and accepting yourself just as who you really are. If you don't take off that “mask” of yours, you will only make that love relationship difficult to last.

Lack of self-esteem leads to fear of rejection—fear that the love relationship may not last. Subconsciously, you “anticipate” the inevitable rejection, picking fights and testing the other person constantly in fits of anger and jealousy, even though deep down you want the love relationship to last. Ironically enough, it may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Reflective Thought

True love always risks rejection.

Case in Point

When God created men, He hoped for a loving relationship. However, love is only real if it is unconditional and freely offered. Accordingly, God made human beings capable of both loving and choosing. Living in faith, you can then love and choose in spite of your innate fear of rejection. 

Not Trusting in Spiritual Wisdom

Any relationship—whether it is the relationship with your family, with your co-workers, or just anyone you just met—is not easy, because it involves people. However, through the spiritual wisdom of grace, all things are possible. Jesus said: “With people, this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

Marriage, for example, is not a short-term option: it is for life. Nowadays, many people are afraid to get married. Trusting in spiritual wisdom means taking the first step, just as Lao Tzu once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.” If you really love someone, take that first step to get married, and put your trust in spiritual wisdom to guide you along the way.

But understanding the spiritual wisdom, without work, is not enough. You need to embrace it and put it into practice.

“You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.” James 2:24

Living in faith is a tall order because you need work, which is marriage commitment. Marriage is a contract, requiring you to honor it “for better or for worse,” which is the commitment in a happy marriage.

Marriage commitment means marriage life is never plain sailing: there will be storms along the voyage.

“And He got up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, ‘Hush, be still.’ And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm. And He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?’” Mark 4:39-40

Marriage commitment means you listen to God's voices for answers to your marriage problems. God always wants to talk to you.

“My sheep hears my voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” John 10:27

If you are His sheep, He will point the way ahead of you.

“Your ears will hear a word behind you, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ whenever you turn to the right or to the left.” Isaiah 30:21

Marriage commitment means you humbly surrender yourself to God. You acknowledge your own weaknesses and problems in your marriage; instead of going your own willful way to deal with them, you choose the spiritual wisdom that is innate in each and every one of us.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart. And do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6

When you have humbly surrendered yourself, God will speak, and you will hear His voice—which is the spiritual wisdom. You will not hear your own voice, or that of the devil.

Marriage commitment means you make yourself and your partner spiritual through worship, prayer, the Word of God, and service to others in His name. Above all, you make yourself open to forgiveness, and cherish togetherness through acceptance and respect for each other.

So, take the leap of faith to marry someone who is prepared to walk with you in this journey of spiritual wisdom. Remember, God gives each of us the capability to love and to choose. Your choice should not be based on physical appearance: all that glitters is not gold.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau