Hair color and retirement: part one

There’s a Venn diagram going on in my head. Remember those? Essentially, there are two circle connected in the middle. The circle on the left contains one subject, like coffee and the circle on the right contains another subject, like orange juice. The place the two circles connect in the middle merges into an overlap area, an area where the two subjects share similarities. In this case? Morning beverages.

In the outside circles, where there is no overlap, there are no similarities. One drink is hot, brown, and loaded with caffeine (okay, an iced decaf is such a thing, although why someone would drink it is beyond me). The other drink is orange, cold, and has lots of calcium and Vitamin C. So … nothing much in common between these two, except they are both morning beverages. That’s the connected place in the middle. (We could probably come up with more similarities, such as they both contain acid, and they both can be intensely caloric. They probably both have addictive properties, as seems to be the case with pretty much everything except laundry and cauliflower. This could go on forever, and trust me, in an eleventh grade English classroom where students are stalling to write an essay, it does.)

Now for the Venn diagram going on in my head.

On the one side? Hair color. And the other? Retirement.

Stay with me.

Y’all know that my word for the year is body. Focusing on that word, especially here in the season of Lent, has made me think more about how Jesus likely views my body. For starters, I’m guessing he sees it as a gift, a blessing. As in, “Hey, look what I got you! A disease-free working body! What? You don’t love it?” And then I imagine the same crestfallen look Matt got that time he washed my car, but I didn’t notice, which is amazing, because that thing is a pig sty.

Back to Jesus and my body. I’m also guessing that, in addition to seeing it as a gift, he also sees it as beautiful. So where I lament large swathes of gravitational pull, he sees what he made. Intentionally. Purposefully. With pleasure. I believe Jesus is pure beauty. So doesn’t it ring true that what he creates is, too?

One more possibility about how Jesus thinks about my body: I suspect Jesus gave me a body so I could use it to experience life in fullness, like riding my bike and baking cookies and holding hands with Happy and tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard in front of me. Singing and sipping coffee so hot, my face turns pink. Watching a spider scootch across the sidewalk. Talking to a student about why her grades are tanking.

All the things.

So as I consider these truths—that my body is a gift, and it is beautiful, and it is meant to be full of aliveness—I feel less inclined to be whiny about having a slow metabolism and robust thighs.

If my body is a beautiful gift meant to bring me into full life, does it make sense that I’d, say, spend $150 a month “transforming” gray hair into blond? That I’d avoid running, which I love, just because I don’t feel like I’m good enough at it, that I am embarrassed at my pace or how I look in spandex?

No, these things do not make sense at all.

Which brings me to hair color. I’ve been a blond since circa 1988. I was not a blond at birth. My hair was a rich, medium brown up until I turned twenty, which is when gray hair started showing up and taking over. I got a few blond streaks to “blend in” with the gray. And over the years, I’ve needed more and more blond streaks, and then a base color with highlights, and then a base color with highlights and lowlights, and somewhere along the way, I became a full-fledged blond. I never looked back until I lost all of my hair in chemotherapy, and when the real stuff came back in, it was mostly white.

Really, Jesus? You gave me white hair? And this is somehow a beautiful gift mean to be a part of how I wholly and fully live my life?

Enough with the left side of the diagram.

On the right, we have retirement.

How in the world does retirement connect (or not) to hair color? Stay tuned. More on this in my next post. In the meantime, here’s to a day, a weekend, a lifetime, dear friends, of fully—and I mean fully—living in our beautiful bodies.