“Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life.”
~ Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon
I tend to go for longish periods of time between getting my haircut. Not terribly long, maybe 4 months or so, but long enough for it to become annoying. It’ll be just long enough that it sort of gets in the way or is just unruly enough to be irritating. This might happen at the 3-month mark, maybe a little before, but still I’ll wait.
I’ll wait because I just don’t really like going to the barber. It’s not fun, it’s sort of pricey, I never know what to say, and a stranger will be touching my head for 20-30 minutes. An all around odd situation which is reason enough for me to put it off.
The repercussions for putting it off are small, but they compound. Having to move your hair away from your face every few minutes has a way of getting under your skin without you ever knowing it.
So eventually I’ll get it cut, bite the bullet, and sit through the awkwardness of small talk and hair cutting, and once it’s done I’ll feel like a million bucks. Like a switch has been flicked, everything will get turned right side up and with alarming clarity I’ll realize just how annoyed I’d been for the past month or so.
This happens every time, like clockwork, an endless cycle in which the solution is so simple yet every time I avoid it.
I see a few solutions ahead of me:
- Learn to cut my own hair and potentially be forced to rock a buzzcut for the rest of my life.
- Never cut my hair again and embrace the hippy lifestyle.
- Go regularly to the barber. Schedule the next appointment right after I’ve completed the current and just go when it’s time to.
We’re human. We procrastinate doing the things that we don’t really like doing, even if they’ll benefit us greatly. Are these things that just have to be bullheaded through? Or are their other angles to these roadblocks that we just don’t see or can’t see because we’re so worked up? Is bravery the solution to fear or is there something else?