Saturday’s hair fail was by no means in the same league as The Great Orange Fringe Disaster of ’87, but it wasn’t one of my finest pieces of handiwork either. I bought what I assumed would be a light brown to just colour over the greys and faded foils in my already dark brown hair – happily and hurriedly applied it, wrapped my head in glad wrap (as you do) and went about my merry way for the next half hour.
A slight sinking feeling crept into my bones as I looked in the mirror to remove the glad wrap… an orange tinge was glowing through the wrap and at once I knew the horrible mistake I’d made.
It wasn’t a dye, it was a bleach. And soon thereafter – washed and dried – my orangey-redish-goldy-brown locks framed my face in glorious frizzy array and all I could think was –
“Ten years.
TEN YEARS.
*T*E*N Y*E*A*R*S*!!!!!!”
Ten years it has taken for my hair to be this length and ten years it will take for the damage to grow out. I know it’s only hair, but ten years is a loooooooooooong time to pay for a mistake that only took moments of inattention.
And then a little parable about intentions hit me.
How often does a moments inattention lead to an effect – either on ourselves or others – that take time to recover from? Sometimes only moments, but sometimes with effects that last for years.
Semi-recently some words of mine, un-fitly spoken, hurt someone I love. I’d actually put considerable time and effort into saying what I did, trying desperately to achieve quite the opposite of what happened, but although my intentions were good, the effect was bad and hurtful, and it has taken time for that person to not hurt anymore. Blessedly this person oozes love and no sustaining damage has occurred, but it hurt so much to know that I’d inflicted hurt – and it was a stinging lesson that often-times intentions and effects do not always follow each other in the planned and hoped for manner.
I love the saying “we judge ourselves by our intentions and each other by their actions”. It exposes a hypocrisy… an inconsistency… a double standard… being favour to ourselves and judgement of the other – OR perhaps – internal understanding and external lack of understanding – which kinda IS the same thing.
What if we tried to understand each other with the same passionate desire TO understand, as we do for ourselves to BE understood…
My Dye Disaster of 2015 may well take ten years to repair – under the veneer of another colour the damage is done – but I think I’ll run with my two reflections – only one of which is actually to do with the dying of hair and the other lets my blunder become an object lesson in loving better.
If I let it.