For the last four months, I have been growing my hair. Its natural growth rate is slower than a snail’s (if a snail had hair, obviously), so the exercise started off fairly depressingly.
Then, somewhere into the hairdresser embargo, I forgot about it altogether.
The in-between stage came and went, and then a patient said it looked good and asked if I’d had layers put in.
I looked at her, surprised, and then took a photo of myself on my phone. Then I took a photo. It did look good. Trouble is, it felt like crap.
It was long in weird places and no matter what I did, I never felt “cute”, another word that had been used to describe it. It felt boring.
What did it matter if it felt boring? After all, I was en-route to hair-Mecca: long and luxurious. The road was bound to be a little bumpy.
But then, when I thought about it, I realised that even when it was long, it wasn’t ever long and luxurious – well not for more than an hour. The fact was that I had thin hair then, and I probably had thin hair now. And it didn’t always look that great. The photos I had taken back then were misleading and, given I could barely remember what it was like to have long hair, it was unwise to base my future on those memories. It doesn’t help that a mere fifty percent of what we remember is allegedly “true” anyway.
I talk a lot about joy, gratitude and following your bliss. Turns out, if you’re not happy where you are, you are unlikely to be happy when you get there - wherever it may be.
So yesterday, I went for a haircut. It felt almost as liberating as when I took the decision to shave it all off.
I have long on top and super short on the sides and, even though I’m not sure if it really fits, it feels really good – and that has to be the barometer for everything that I do.
It doesn’t matter if a certain yoga practice will make me enlightened, or whether a particular diet will give me the body of my dreams, the question is, and always has to be, am I enjoying it now?
If you don’t enjoy the journey, well, “in the long run, we are all dead” (John Maynard Keynes.
So don’t suck it up, hoping for a better future. Feel better today.
Today. Yes, today.
It is very, very, very easy.
You just have to be courageous enough tell yourself the truth first.
