The Universal Wisdom of the Person Who Cuts Your Hair

It’s hard to see things from different angles. It’s really hard. It’s hard for me to know how a black man from an impoverished neighborhood has grown up and what odds he’s faced. It’s hard for me to understand the plight of a transgender woman. It’s hard for me to understand the hardships that any of my three sisters face growing up as beautiful young women in a world that still presents too many dangers for them. It’s hard for me to know what my parents gave up in raising four kids (to hear them tell it — nothing at all, but I know that they’ve probably just forgotten because they’re like that).

A couple of years ago, my boyfriend, then tending bar at a popular gay bar in New Orleans, had made a friend. He made friends very often, very easily. She was a lovely middle-aged woman, a teacher. I didn’t care to meet her, because I don’t usually care to meet new people in bars. Or, for that matter, under very many other circumstance, either. But when I walked in to see him and get a drink during the busy hours, he introduced me to her and told me I should talk to her. I can’t remember exactly what all we talked about. It was a decent conversation, despite the fact that I couldn’t hear everything she was saying, and despite the fact that I just wanted to get out of the crowd. But I do remember reaching a conclusion with her that I’d never reached before.

I said, “You don’t know what it’s like for me to be a gay man in today’s world. You may never know. But you could. I very firmly think you could. All I have to do is talk, and all you have to do is listen.” It was an affirmation for her, struggling to reach the hearts of some of her students in recent days, and she began crying. Laughing and crying and apologizing for it. I thought it was sweet, and I left her there to stew on that. Normally, I forget some of the more profound things I say. That one stayed with me.

I hear a lot about how impossible it is for someone to see things from different points of views. A cup you see as half full, someone else sees as half empty. The colors a color-blind person sees are incomplete next to those that a non-color-blind person sees. Is the dress white and gold, or black and blue? It almost seems impossible.

I got my hair cut today. It is the best cut I’ve ever had. I was thrilled with it. I wanted to take it out and show it to everyone. I wanted everyone to notice it. My barber was friendly. I’d never had that particular individual cut my hair before, so I had to explain to him what I wanted, like I’d had to do for the two other barbers there when I first sat with each of them. But he executed it perfectly. Beyond my expectations. I followed the motion of his scissors and the clippers as they traveled across my hair, behind my ears, at the bottom of my neck. I sensed that he was using different clipping tools than the other barbers because of the way they felt. He was slow and deliberate. We didn’t talk much, which was new for me, but I didn’t mind it.

But he was doing something that all great stylists have to do in order to be successful, that almost nobody else has to do. He was looking at my hair holistically. He took a random client, a guy that just walked into his shop, and listened to what he had to say. And then he made sure that, no matter which way I look at my hair, or which way anybody else looks at my hair, it’s going to be exactly how I wanted it. When I left, he was going to have to do the same thing for a person with a completely different taste. He had to see my hair as it was then, and as it could be, as I wanted it to be, and then had to understand what it was going to look like in any situation. Not unlike a sculptor in the fact of crafting a three-dimension object, but quite unlike a sculptor in that he was going to be paid by my satisfaction. He didn’t have much of a choice over what I wanted. His job dictates that I’m happy with every angle, or he could have a difficult customer on his hands (he would never guess how agreeable I am about my hair — I just have to be able to make it look like something I like after the fact).

But his painstaking attention to the annoying details of my cranium reminded me of something: understanding a situation from a different angle is possible, and it’s useful. I can understand what somebody else is going through. It doesn’t take much as far as empathic skill — I don’t have to feel like them, or try to put myself in their shoes. I have to recognize their particular circumstances as true and factual, as having had some effect on their current situation. I have to always leave room for the circumstances I don’t know, even while I’m drawing conclusions from the few I do know. I’ve done this a lot recently in my reflections on my parents and their various hardships, on racism, on my boyfriend’s history with his family and his past relationships. Real life, reality as it is, can be understood. The conditions under which any individual understands it does not make it essentially mysterious or fundamentally hidden. Two modes of understanding something can exist and both be factual, even if a decent opinion of that thing can only be had by integrating them, looking at them from every angle.

Have you heard the notion that we may be missing an entire element of sensation simply because we don’t have the organ to perceive it? That may be true, but it doesn’t remove the truth of the sensations that we do perceive. One thing that I like to reflect on is the illusion of a stick bending in water. It’s a trick played on the eyes by the effect of the light hitting the surface of the water and bending, and reflecting an off-center image of the stick beneath the surface. But just think of it: if we never wondered why a stick looked bent in the water, what would we have failed to discover about optics and the nature of light and clear surfaces? Furthermore, if the stick did not appear bent, what wouldn’t that then be, not a reflection of the truth of the matter, but a lie our brain was telling us by cutting out the fundamental nature of optics?

If my barber didn’t know how to see things from multiple perspectives, including the perspective of some stranger who gave him vague details about how he wanted his hair to look, what kind of haircut would I have to walk out of the barber shop with?!

For those that are curious, here is my amazing hair:

It looks a lot better in person. Don’t mind the mess.