Slow Havamal: 61

[kylec]

The 61st verse says to always leave home groomed and fed, even if your clothes aren’t so expensive. Never be ashamed of your pants, your shoes, your horse, even if it isn’t any good.

There’s a temptation among those of us with a perfectionist slant to become dejected if anything at all doesn’t measure up. If it can’t be flawless, why bother? This attitude often earns praise as a motivation to triumph or stay in bed. It’s a nasty booby-trap that maims more people than it inspires. I’m married, and getting older. I don’t look as gallant as I did at my best, which wasn’t very gallant even then, so what’s the point of keeping up a failing workout routine? If there’s no one to impress, why comb my hair when I’m just going to the grocery store?

In a sense, it sounds like a healthier position to ease off of myself on things that don’t matter so much. And it’s true, I can get away with holes in my jeans and a beard bending like a windsock on a calm day. Vanity never served me at my best, but in the words of Lee Corso, “Not so fast, my friend!”

Why must I assume that if I can’t turn heads, I might as well get confused with the local hobos? This is a sinister binary. In fact, there’s no such thing as perfect. It’s a subjective ideal, and those goalposts always move just in time. Certainly to aim for it and come short lands us somewhere fine, but how can we enjoy it if we set our hearts on perfection and let anything less truck us with a sense of crippling failure? The reaction against that imperative is to turn into a careless slob in private rebellion, but Odin suggests that there’s a middle way.

We’re told to do our best with what we have. To be ashamed of your state of being is to start down a road of decline full of mud wallows and broken mirrors. Your clothes and your horse make a fine metaphor for what you present to the world, and how you move through it. Whatever we think of ourselves, people will treat us differently if we hold our heads high and pat our old mare lovingly when we hitch it to the post beside our neighbor’s regal Clydesdale. To have clothes and a horse at all is a gift, and when we give up maintaining them, we forsake and diminish our own value. If there is hope of improvement, it doesn’t come by torching everything we own. If not, then we at least hold some dignity for longer than we would if we padded around town in our own filth.

If you have hair, comb it. If you’re bald, pass a razor over your dome. Wear the nicer t-shirt. Clean your room. Shower. Write, even if you’re not very good at it. Sing if anyone will listen. You may bring a novitiate understanding to great old text. If so, bring it. We can get lost in our admiration of great talents, great beauties, to the point that we throw our hands up in futility. To do so is to refuse to reciprocate to the world the gifts that we’ve been given. Whatever horse we sit upon, let us ride it with gratitude.

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

What's interesting is that the idea of perfection even looms at all here. In this age, we may have lost the sense that things can even be better or worse. And I think you've nailed it: the physical habits we cultivate impinge on the mental (and the spiritual). Solid.

[kylec]

I think you're right. We so easily assume what we're feeling is either perfect or abysmal that we lose sight of a huge gradient of possibility.