Phases

So, one day the princess woke up to find that her hair had started to grey and her skin looked like wrinkled paper. She walked to the mirror and gasped: "Where have all the years gone?" She had no recollection. Just fleeting moments from her past were all that remained in her memory. She felt utterly despondent and sat down to decide what to do.
Her lady-in-waiting walked in on her, lost deep in thought. On hearing what troubled the princess she suggested getting the Country Witch to prepare a potion to reverse the years.
The princess kept thinking.
At dinner, she brought up the subject with the father. He laughed and suggested that she ought to take a holiday to forget her worries.
But, the princess kept thinking.
The next morning on waking from a troubled sleep she went for a stroll in the gardens. The elderly gardener was pruning the hedges to look like waves. He bowed and greeted her and couldn't help asking: "Is something the matter, my lady?" The princess told him the cause of her worries and to her surprise the gardener laughed out loud. He promptly apologised and said: "My lady, you have to let it pass. That is the only way to deal with time."
And suddenly the truth in his words hit home. The princess' face cleared as if a cloud covering the sun had passed. That was it! She just had to let it go...not try to stop it, not think about why it had passed, but just simply open her fists and let the sand run through her fingers.
The princess realised this and smiled.