Nov 23 2008
How Vanity Safely Provides Sanity
The Good | Knowing Your Own Rules and Living By Them
Self-awareness is a pretty broad topic, but there’s one section of it that I believe could benefit everyone if they observed it themselves with greater scrutiny.
The way most people appear the live their life, they are not quite sleepwalking, but not quite awake either. They do what they think is best given what they know, but all too often they’ll be confronted with situations that they’ve seen a hundred times before and act like they never learned a thing from it.
Is it a memory access issue? Attention span? It’s both and it’s neither. Were anyone to stop and think before making a decision, they could find it within themselves to know and to analyze their own history, their own present, and make informed determinations about the future. Anyone who says that’s too hard hasn’t tried.
I myself don’t apply it on any grand scale. I try to, out of self-preservation, but that doesn’t make me good at it. I do use it in relatively petty ways to streamline my life to a fit that I’m comfortable with.
As an example, I don’t find myself to be unattractive but I have a crooked nose, a smile that falls off to one side, and a busted up eye. On my best day those characteristics could throw off someone’s appraisal. Aside from that though, I don’t think I’m that bad-looking. I would never expect anyone to believe it but I could be 100% objective in this department.
Anyway, I know the ways in which I look bad because I’ve seen it. The eye is a usual culprit but somewhat relatedly a puffy cheek on the same side means if you take a picture of me from one ¾ perspective, I look decent, and if you take it from the other, I look sort of like an abomination consisting of Clay Aiken, Peter Lorre and medium eggplant.
Armed with this information, I say to myself, “Geez, you have the capability of looking pretty friggin’ nasty.” So what do I do?
I don’t make funny faces.
Don’t get me wrong, I love being expressive. It comes naturally to me and it’s part of my job. But I will never push it too far, and certainly not in front of a camera, because I can so easily appear ugly and the last thing I want to do is leave an indelible mark in anyone’s memory of the one view of me they had where I looked like an rotting sea creature.
A weird example, to be sure, but apply it to something serious in your life and I guarantee you’ll see the wisdom.
