Learning the Art of Mindful Risk-Taking

Business in Front…

It’s morning. Monday. I’ve just finished reading an article in this month’s Vogue about the “fashionable” return of the mullet. “Unusual times call for unusual haircuts,” Jancee Dunn writes.

Perhaps.

But then it might also be true that unusual haircuts summon unusual feelings of expiration and fatigue, because I cannot shake a strange heaviness as I close the magazine, toss it to land atop the heap of books I’ve left half-read on the coffee table, and pick up my mug of swiftly cooling coffee. Perhaps it’s the 40th birthday—a milestone! everyone keeps reminding me—I’ll be celebrating in a few days, more than my worrying whether or not I’ve aged out of the hair trend of the moment. Either way, the article has left me feeling inexplicably…old.

Not that I think I’m too old to get a mullet. But I’m old enough to know better.

I’m old enough to know better than to get a risky haircut on a whim, to know how long it takes to grow bangs out, to be certain that burgundy is indeed NOT my color, to know without a doubt that I will never, ever get my hair to curl the way my stylist does.

But now I’m wondering: am I too old to take a good old fashioned risk?

The truth is, I’d like some change, however minor. Something to freshen up this limp, thinned, quarantined hair. Something to shake up a life that increasingly feels as though it’s been set in stone. Something to remind me that change is still possible for me, that the life I established at 20 is not the life I’m destined to live—over and over and over agin—until I’m 80.

Or 40.

It’s not just since the pandemic that I’ve been feeling stalemated, but spending 15 months cooped up with my husband in the same apartment I lived in with roommates in my twenties certainly made me irrevocably aware of the groundhog’s day my life has become. Certain things I don’t want to change—the husband is great, the friends are good—but I’ve been craving things like a new home, one that we own, that belongs to us. (What a grown up desire, indeed!) And I’d like to shed some old clothes, clothes that don't fit my body comfortably or don’t suit the woman I’ve evolved into. I want a fuller, bolder eyebrow, and yes, a fresh shape to my hair.

When I was 20, if I ever felt antsy for something new or different, I wouldn’t think twice about plunging into an unknown abyss. Whether or not things would work out wasn’t a question I considered so much as “what’s the worst that can happen?” And at 20, with little to nothing to lose, the potential rewards always seemed to outweigh the potential risks.

At 40, I understand that some changes are less risky than others.

It’s easier to paint a wall in the apartment I am in than to buy a new home in a different city.

It’s financially safer to cut back some hours at my current job to make time to grow a side hustle into a full-time money maker than it is to quit entirely and force the pressure to pay the bills on a career that doesn’t exist yet.

It’s less risky to cut some long layers and freshen my hair color than to have my stylist cut a mullet.

Perhaps, at 39 going on 40, it’s not that I’ve grown too old to take risks, but that I’ve learned enough from past mistakes not to pull myself backward by making old mistakes again. I’m not going back to bad bangs that will take me three years to grow out. I’m certainly not about to cut my painstakingly grown out bangs into a currently trending hair cut that has been notoriously hated and unflattering for decades.

No. I am still growing, changing, moving, but I am only moving forward. I’m not driving blindly into any unknowns, if I can help it. Not out of fear, but out of being old enough to know better.

I am marching mindfully toward the vision and dreams I hold for my life. My goals, markers along the road as I achieve them that I am still headed the right direction.

Perhaps the biggest difference between turning 20 and turning 40 is that at 20, I wasn’t old enough to know better about certain things, and had no real vision for my future. Could only see as far as my next semester’s class schedule. At 40, I have real experience and a clear vision for my future.

And it is beautiful. And I want to experience it all. And I am old enough to know better than to risk it all for a bad haircut that will take me years to grow out of.

So I think, as I sit here with my mug of cold coffee and my stack of half read books topped with this month’s issue of Vogue, that I am not too old to take risks. Rather, I am just old enough to take educated risks. And there is nothing stale or small about that. In fact, it makes me understand just how valuable and vast is the expanse of my experience so far,

and I’m only just turning 40.