Yesterday I was washing my hands in the bathroom and I noticed something frightening in the mirror…my face. Well, not just my face, but what I spotted on my face.
A weird half-inch-long hair had grown out of the side of my forehead. It was all by itself, just a few inches above my eyeballs. And when I say all by itself, I’m taking no other hairs were within eye-shot. It was lonely, like no-date-on-prom-playing-video-games-by-yourself lonely.
I honestly have no idea where it came from. And what was even more strange was that I hadn’t noticed it growing.
I do not have a big head, but thanks to a receding hairline, I have a lot of forehead. There is a lot of room to notice random hairs. But somehow this hair flew under the radar until it was hit just perfectly by the bathroom light. It must have been growing for weeks.
Seeing it, I immediately panicked. I started scouring my face to spot all of the other random things I hadn’t notice growing out of my skull. I began worrying that everyone I had talked to over the past 2 weeks had seen this hair and thought I was some kind of ape. I even became concerned that I was suffering from a new disease that causes you to be blind, but only to certain hairs.
I was so focused on all of the terrible things that I nearly walked right out of the bathroom without plucking the hair from my head. I nearly bypassed the one thing I could control because I was so concerned with everything that was out of my control – wondering if others had noticed, questioning how I didn’t notice, and making up absurd diseases. My panic almost caused me to overlook the only thing that mattered at the time. Yanking out this weird hair.
Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we are blinded to something that needs fixing. We are chugging along minding our own business when boom, we spot an hiccup in our daily routine. It takes just the right lighting to notice that errors in our ways or the weird hair growing out of our head.
When this happens we have two choices: we can worry about the past and become paralyzed by the thought of what others might have seen (only to panic and not prevent the problem from happening again), or we can pull out the hair, correct the error, and control what we can control in the present.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
