Bloody Furrows and Perspective
I hate shaving, not just because it’s boring and a pain in the ass but also because I’m very bad at it. You may wonder how one could be bad at scraping hair off of one’s face using a razor with a moveable head and three blades and a little aloe healing aloe strip along the top. I often wonder the same thing myself. But the sad fact is that I usually come out of the bathroom looking like an extra from a slasher move crossed with a werewolf in mid-transformation, little tufts of hair growing out between the bloody furrows carved down my cheeks. It’s pathetic.
I’m old enough now to know that it’s pointless to try to conquer my deficiencies: it’s much easier, and more effective, to outsmart them. In this particular case, I’ve begun to realize that half of my problem is that my lying eyes just won’t show me what I’m doing wrong. I could finish shaving and stare at the mirror for a good five minutes and still not see the strip of missed beard winding its way down along my jawline and curling around my mouth and then striking off across the opposite cheek, like a column of army ants marching out of my left ear toward my right.
So here’s what I do. It’s simple really. I turn my head ninety degrees, and look in the mirror on the face of my medicine cabinet; and, quite suddenly, I see everything I missed. It’s uncanny, the equivalent of opening my eyes, or at least those semi-opaque membranes of my eyes that filter out facial hair. But I’m no closer to the mirror on my right that I am to the mirror in front of me, the light’s no better or worse, there’s absolutely no difference between the first view and the second except that they’re different views.
I think there’s a message here about the importance of changing your perspective every so often. I don’t know whether it’s the world or our senses that are so unreliable, but you can’t trust anything you see if you’re seeing it from just one angle. There may be be three material dimensions but there are at least a billion perceptual ones, and you need to shift your sightlines along as many of their axes as you possibly can, if you’re at all interested in the real story.
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