I am eating a carrot. I just hula hooped. My hair is thinning. I have been doing pilates for the last 10 days.
I’m thinking about my hula hooping. I bought a hoop about a week ago, inspired by a particular Indian girl who I discovered on Instagram who is about my age and has made a career out of ‘hoop flow’. I wanted to do the same. Not the career bit, but just look as cool as she does. I tend to like trying movement-related things, and when I imagine a most fully embodied version of myself, I see an Amina who dances uninhibitedly. So I bought a hula hoop.
I must admit I’m quite bad at it. I can barely spin the thing around my waist for more than 5-10 spins, and when I film myself for evidence I look rather silly. I can see, however, that I’m picking up more tricks each day with the videos that I do practice from, and I’m getting better at the ones that I didn’t even know how to do just 10 days ago. So far I’ve been practicing between 10-30 minutes everyday.
This made me think about being practice-oriented as opposed to goal oriented. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but that I have noticed in myself a tendency to continue on with the things I begin from a place of ‘let’s try this out for funsies’ than from a place of ‘this arbitrary thing must be achieved’.
For example, the curly girl method. My hair wasn’t falling, or looking excessively damaged, and nor was I trying to get it to grow or anything like that. It was something I discovered over 5 years ago, tried once, noticed positive changes, and then kept on doing. There was no particular ‘result’ I was working towards.
About a year and a half ago, I stopped religiously doing the curly girl method, and started to use less harmful chemical containing shampoo and conditioner and went back to a somewhat regular hair-wash routine, albeit a more mindful one than in my pre-curly girl life.
And my hair is starting to fall. It has been falling everyday of my life, and I’m not sure if it falls more than it should, but given the reduction in volume that I see now as compared to 5 years ago, I’m hearing alarm bells. It feels urgent. I don’t want to start balding. And I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong.
I have felt this urgency before today, too. I have noticed a thinning in places on my scalp that did not exist some years ago, and I started to Google fixes. There are so many: certain shampoos, oil concoctions, dietary changes, vitamin supplements, desi totkas, etc etc. But the thing with these Google-able fixes is that they are very much comparable, I think, to diets. Few people, with the exception of perhaps adventurous Internet personalities, will go on a diet for the joy of it. They have a destination in mind. But we already know what happens when the process isn’t fun. (We quit).
So.. what I’m trying to say is that goals, I suppose, can be useful, but perhaps they are not quite as helpful as they’re touted to be. They kind of don’t work for me most times, and when I don’t land at the outcome I had anticipated and even written down, I can feel quite not-good about myself. And this despite knowing that I can be quite disciplined and diligent when I do set my mind to something.
I didn’t start doing pilates to get anywhere, and while I definitely would like to be a proficient hoop dancer, I don’t expect to get there if I’m not having fun practicing.
But my hair is thinning, and it feels urgent, and I realize that maybe what is necessary is a shift in life-practice rather than the goal of thicker hair. Because with things like this, changes are usually incremental and don’t show and this can have the deflating effect of making us feel needlessly bad and failurey. So when it comes to my hair.. I suppose now that I’m aware of the damage done by a certain kind of lifestyle, I’m going to need to make another kind of lifestyle sound more appealing. I am not sure what it is, but it will involve more gentleness, care, and a sense of trust in the process.
A note for life in general, as per usual.
I love this! I recently read somewhere to be joy oriented rather than goal oriented and have been thinking about it a lot
I totally get where you are coming from and its something i have been discovering/ realising for myself too... Precocious youths!!! Getting there sooner :)) 😘😘😘😘😘