A very pleasant shave this morning, with an extra-creamy lather I attribute to the fineness of the (synthetic) bristles of the Yaqi Target Shot brush, whose handle is camouflaged so that you can shave undetected near the enemy. (At the link you’ll notice the brush comes with two knots: a badger and the synthetic shone in the photo. Not bad for $35.) Some credit for the fine lather — particularly the wonderful fragrance — must go also to the soap, of course. No matter how good the brush, a crap soap will not deliver. But if the soap is good, an excellent brush can contribute to lather quality.
The Fine Classic, now that I’ve learned to keep the handle farther from my face, is one of my favorite slants now and is truly excellent in feel and performance — and in fit, finish, and looks, for that matter. Three passes left my face exceptionally smooth, especially when contrasted with the sandpaper roughness of the two-day stubble the razor (easily) removed.
A splah of Phoneix Artisan’s Organism 46-B aftershave to renew the fragrance, and I’m set for the day.
I was up quite early to make a grocery-store run, and it’s somewhat overcast, so that self-timer trick was important: shutter speed was a good-sized fraction of a second, but by stepping away from the camera and letting it take care of shutter release, the photo is quite crisp.
The comment on experience comes from recent reflections renewed this morning. I was thinking about shaving soaps and how many excellent soaps there are (and two more are now wending their separate ways to me), and how, even with my fairly extensive collection, I have tried only a fraction of soaps available.
And so it is overall: no matter how deeply any of us drink of what life has to offer, no matter how extensive his or her experience, s/he can but scratch the surface. Almost all of what life can offer s/he will never sample.
I got to thinking about this as I whipped through my email inbox, deleting unread newsletter after newsletter. For a while I tried to keep current with in-depth reading of news and politics, but I realized finally the futility of that. Now I limit that reading to a much smaller fraction of my time, selecting sources for reliability and willingness to point out hard truths, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” The rest of my time focuses on other experiences — cooking, reading books, watching movies, learning new things (e.g., Esperanto), walking (again).
I understand that I’m getting only a small sample of life’s possibilities, that (for example) I shall never go rock-climbing, or really play a musical instrument, or explore the headwaters of the Amazon, or sample more than a small fraction of the foods found in the world’s cuisines.
We have to find satisfaction in the portion of life’s experiences we can have, and I am fortunate to have some choice in the matter. Many do not. But even with good fortune and extensive resources, most of the panoply of possibilities will remain unrealized. We can pick a particular possibility and experience that, but doing that means a myriad other paths are not taken.
“Go with what you’ve got” is what a journalism professor at Columbia used to chant at his charges, slapping his ruler on the desk as the deadline approached. Life is moving on, so we must make our choices (and only some have that luxury in any major way). We must choose the life possibilities we shall sample and seek satisfaction and fulfillment in those, and not be constantly looking around at what others are getting and wanting to have that as well. That’s like wanting to read all the books published.
All the books published: that points out another severe limit on our own slice of experience. At one time, one could read all the books published because only a very very few had been. TOur experience, only a tiny fraction of what’s available now, is also but an even tinier fraction of human experience over time. We shall never know the novelty of going to London’s very first coffee shops, or sharing in the discovery of new lands and new ideas that, now well known, have lost the power of novelty. We cannot walk in the primeval forests that once cloaked the Eastern mountains and seaboard, nor can we any longer see the sky darkened by passenger pigeons.
Our lives are spent on the tip of a needle that sits atop a mountain of present actuality, past history, and future possibility — a mountain we can never experience or even know (as no one in Dickens’s England could know the thrill of Formula One racing).
Such reflections, rather than frustrating me, have eased my mind. I now feel comfortable in not trying to read all news reports and ponder all opinion columns. I know I will see but a small sample, and that is all one can do. I no longer strain to scoop up more and more. Instead, I give the news some time, and then I turn to other things. FOMO (fear of missing out) has lost its power: I will miss out, on many things, and so will we all. That’s life.