It can make all the difference. In how you appear – the appearance, and your consciousness of it. It makes the difference whether you can focus on what truly matters to you for the rest of the week – work, showing up, gatherings.
It often goes right; it’s done easily and routinely by those charged with its high calling, to define the destiny of a man for 6 days or 7. Yet it’s often fraught with so many hitches.
It’s the haircut. Both a simple act and an intricate art that trims, mows, carves and gives meaning to the hair distribution on a man’s scalp. The practice has persevered for millennia, yet one inconvenience or another continues to be endured at the hands of the craftsmen.
When Joe goes to his usual hair shrine – the b’s shop – to tend to the sacred lawn on his head, is it too fantastical that he wishes to enjoy everything about the process? Maybe. Here are a few snags that often make his dream farfetched:
Symmetry: Nobody insists that life is balanced, or that we don’t encounter lopsidedness in the everyday. Even our body has uneven apportionment of tissue between any left and right sides. However here’s one opportunity for that meticulous beauty of symmetry to be put on display, but the barber fails to rise by this little detail to the glory of his trade when he forgets to keep a close eye on the other side of the terrain while carving on this side.
Executing the plan: Joe has a picture in his head of what his head will look like at the end of the ritual. But so does the barber! And some of them, even after asking Joe’s opinion, have insisted in their minds (maybe unknowingly), what fits Joe’s head, as if they own it. Professional counsel is totally welcome, but no one gets to desire the look of a man’s head more than the man. Dear Barber, in the next 30 minutes, do your best to help Joe fulfil his vision, not yours.
The smooth: The procedure itself in skilled hands, can have a desirable flow and finesse to it, acquired through a long acquaintance with the angles and contours of various heads. But, ever had a barber use a clipper on you like he was leaning on it for support on the floor of your scalp? Even if you’re going to get a great job done, why the force Baba?
And you dear reader, would you have assumed that barbing was too mundane to write about? I did. But here’s the point: what has been done of barbing here may be done of what you and I do everyday when we get up and go out.
Then, do we leave a trail of palpable excellence? Do we seek to? Or is it in the realm of fantasy for our clients and coworkers, when it should be the propriety of all work?
With all its glitches, barbing to me continues to remain a form of therapy. Tell me about your experience at the receiving end of this trade.
oluwajobaoroge 