Bearing the Whips and Cowlicks of Time
The beautiful thing is that if we accept what we have to offer and do our best to capitalize on those “cowlicks” rather than wishing we were someone else, we’re probably going to find that we are full of great ideas and enough discipline to help us through.
I remember walking with an old choir director from high school. I don’t remember how the conversation got started, but somehow we were chatting about different hair styles and whether it’s better to have straight hair or curly. At the time, I pretty much just messed up my hair in the mornings to go with that charming “starving artist” devil may care look and so I was obviously advocating for the curly side of the house. Just before we arrived at the stadium where we were going to perform, Mrs. Anderson made her final argument.
“Yeah, curly hair’s fine, but then you have to deal with cowlicks.” And with that she dashed off to setup for the concert, leaving me feeling slightly snubbed and thoughtfully raking through my hair with my fingers trying to determine if she was right about the cowlick thing.
Now, I have a bit broader perspective on what she had said and, much more importantly, what she didn’t say but made me think about. First, she probably is right about the cowlick thing although blow drying and shaping curl hair does wonders in that department. But she also made me think about the kinds of tradeoffs we make everyday in life that ultimately decide our character, our aptitude, and our feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment.
It’s human nature to regret some things in life: the missed opportunity we weren’t brave enough to take advantage of, the relationship we might have had if we had only asked for a date, and so on. I’ve learned to realize that the path not taken is often a very broad and pervasive one in our minds’ eye. And I certainly can’t say I don’t do regrets exactly. But I think I’ve been blessed with a perspective that generally sees opportunities in the present a lot more often than wishing for second chances to relive past deeds. And I think that’s partly because if I were to dwell on regrets, it very well might spell my own disaster because I had a lot going for me when I was young that shifted dramatically.
But I also think part of the reason why I don’t dwell on regrets is because I see strong benefits out of most paths. Having curly hair has some advantages and is popular and trendy from time to time. Other times straight hair is in vogue. In some ways curly hair is easier to set up in the mornings, but it can also be impossibly wild and some days that hair cream just doesn’t cut it—pun intended.
Despite these strengths and drawbacks I generally don’t see very many people trying to meet in the middle by trying to have sort of curly hair and sort of straight or half of their head is covered in curly hair and the other half straight. No, it seems like most people try to capitalize on whatever hair situation they’ve been given and they try to make the most out of it. But how many times do we do the half curly half straight technique when it comes to committing to more important things than hair styles?
Some of us might want to learn Spanish—like me—and so we take a half measure approach: never getting really into the groove of consistently studying and then we get disappointed when we see that we haven’t made much progress. A few years back, I trained to run a marathon. I learned pretty quickly in the training regime that I couldn’t fake it with this. I couldn’t just go for a few runs here and there and trust that my general fitness would be good enough to pull me through all 26.2 miles. Marathons eat up people with that kind of thinking. We just have to clock the miles so that our hearts and lungs and muscles can handle the strain. Some of us might have a wonderful start for a novel. But I realized writing my first one last year, that I don’t care how great an idea we might have, if we don’t couple that idea with enough commitment and discipline to get through the multiple drafts and months and months of crafting and editing, we’re not going to end up with a good product.
The beautiful thing is that if we accept what we have to offer and do our best to capitalize on those “cowlicks” rather than wishing we were someone else, we’re probably going to find that we are full of great ideas and enough discipline to help us through.