When she said, “About three quarters of an inch okay?” I should have said, “I like to keep as much as possible.” But I didn’t say that, and so she went right ahead and cut most of it off. The hair on the top of my head. That top part of my hair that falls over the “thin zone” to provide the illusion of youth and vigor. She severed my illusion! So now I’m stuck with a bad haircut, and by bad I mean a haircut that reveals the truth, the real reality of my ever-expanding forehead.
I don’t like losing my hair, however much that goes against the grain of my “acceptance-based” spiritual ideals. Even if it weren’t a sign of getting old it would be distressing. My attractiveness level (on the ubiquitous scale of 1 to 10) peaked out at about a 6 back in the early nineties. Hair loss does not boost my rating. And now, twenty years or so after starting my decent toward the six-foot hole at the bottom of “the hill,” the hair loss has that added, objective, sign-of-decay-and-pending-demise sort of significance as well. But hey, it’s morning time, and the birds are singing!
Yesterday you could hear a turd drop for that twenty minutes or so that the giant hawk was perched on my neighbors roof. It was duck-and-cover for just about every life form within a square mile. How they all know the difference between a hawk and a really really big pigeon is a mystery to me. I suppose it’s a know-or-die type of scenario. You either get it or you get it.
I wonder if spiritual realization is like that, in a way. If it’s a know or die type of thing? Except that the death associated with not knowing is a living death, a zombie-like existence whereby deep down you know that you know, but you’d rather go on pretending that you don’t know. You know? You either get it or it gets you. Know thyself, or else! Or else the giant hawk will pounce, will lift you to the clouds before dropping you on your big, balding head.
Next time I’ll be sure to say, “Just a clean-up around the ears.”