Browsing Tag: perfection

Many years ago I had some one new cut my hair and she cut it very short, a lot shorter than what I wanted.  I was embarrassed it was so short, was sure I looked idiotic and no longer feminine, and drove home crying.  When I got home I immediately called my husband at work (this was before cell phones).  As soon as he got on the phone I started crying and through long pauses, in which I tried to control my crying, I could barely get the words out that my hair was ruined by being cut too short. His response?  He started laughing.  It turned out he was sure that one of the kids had been hit by a car or something equally terrible and he was so relieved that it was just my hair that he started laughing.  This didn’t go over too well because I was very upset about my hair and he was laughing!  A few weeks later my hair grew out, life looked better and I began to learn about perspective.  I began to learn about what is truly important and what seems important at the time but is really unimportant in the scheme of things, like my terrible hair cut.  I have learned there are few truly important things worth getting upset over and they were usually things that really would affect my life, and often had great impact on me.  It seems that most of the things I would get upset about when I was younger actually fell in the truly unimportant area.  Things that seemed important like a messy house when someone came over unexpectedly, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time or my kids not excelling in ways I thought they should, and a whole host of other silly things.  When these kind of things happened I would sometimes stew about them for days feeling very inept.  I basically beat myself up for not being perfect, but ironically, not perfect in unimportant things.  Over time I had experiences that taught me about life and I was able to better judge what was worth getting upset over.  I learned to ask myself “will this matter in 2 years, or even 2 weeks” and the number of years varied based on what was happening.  Usually the answer was not just “no” but it was an emphatic “no.”  Most of the things that I worried about were unimportant.  This little question helped me to learn perspective and to save my energy for the important things that happen, because the important things of life usually take a lot of energy.  Now when my hair is cut too short I am able to be philosophical about it because I know it will grow out and really, in the scheme of things, a terrible hair cut is something to laugh about.