Wednesday, July 27, 2011

On Rat Nests and Life

My hair grows rat nests from time to time.  They are totally disgusting knots of hair that tend to grow at the back of my neck, under my pony tail, an area that is easily skipped if I brush my hair in a hurry.  Two of my children had times when they deliberately cultivated dreadlocks, which are essentially controlled and elongated rat nests that they had to work quite hard at creating and maintaining.  But my rat nests are private balls of grossness that I hope nobody else sees.  I tell myself that no one else sees them.  They come from not using the right brushes and not doing the job thoroughly.  But once they are established they are a real nuisance to get out.

There are basically two approaches.  One is to take out the scissors, and hack the thing off.  If it has grown too big, this can mean loosing quite a bit of hair, and having some strange short ends in your hairdo while the strands you have sliced out regrow.  The other is a lot more tedious and time consuming, and there is no guarantee that it will be completely successful.  You soak the thing in hair conditioner, and gradually tease it apart with combs and brushes, bit by bit.  When you reach the point where your nerves are frayed, you wash it, regain your composure, add more conditioner, and begin again.  Some hair gets lost in the process, some gets pulled out by the roots when you get too impatient, but with patience, work and time, and lots of hair conditioner, you can straighten these things out.

All of this is a trivial and somewhat disgusting part of personal hygiene.  And yes, over the years I HAVE managed to get somewhat better at dealing with these before they grow too big.  I have better hair brushes, and I've learned to pay a bit more attention.  I have years when I don't grow any rat nests at all.

The trouble is that my life grows hairballs too, or messes that are the equivalent.  Messes that come from not doing things right, from skipping steps, and taking short cuts, and not paying attention to details.  From letting things slide.  Just like the rat nests at the back of my neck, the bigger they grow, the less I want to deal with them.  Which makes them grow even worse.  And those hairballs of life can be a lot trickier to undo, because the threads are likely to involve relationships with other people.  I mean, when the issue is just a scuzzy uncleaned refrigerator, you make the time, and you throw stuff out.  Bleach will kill most of the germs most of the time.  I don't buy real Tupperware because it's too expensive if you are going to have to throw it out when the contents are too gross to look at.  But going back to people and apologizing is much harder.  Figuring out how to make things right when you've really messed up, even if the messes are lots of little things. The problem is that you know that if you had set things right when it was just a tangle at the end of a day, there would have been no issue.  But now you have a huge snarl, that's been weeks or months growing.  I never let a rat nest grow for a year in my hair, but messes in relationships have an easy time growing for years.

You can cut them out.  I guess that's what happens with some divorces and failed friendships.  Maybe sometimes that's the only solution.  I had a co-worker once who had a drawer full of unpaid parking tickets.  He was planning, so he said, to cut all ties, change his name and move to another town.  It seemed like a drastic solution.   And I suspect some suicides are just a case of the hair balls of life feeling impossible to deal with.  Better to cut my head off than try to straighten things out.

I think the grace of God is a lot like hair conditioner.  I'd love to have a magic liquid that I could pour on rat nests in my hair and make them straighten out.  I'd love to have the right kind of prayer that would suddenly and miraculously untangle all the hair balls in my life.  In my experience it doesn't work that way.  On the other hand, the grace of God does make what seems completely insoluble something that can be coped with.  And what is more, God, like a special friend or a supremely patient mother can help us get through that depressing job of combing the tangles out, standing beside us and keeping us at the task without destroying our hope and courage.

Sure, it's a whole lot easier if you never let the rat nests grow in the first place.  Keeping short accounts, applying the grace of God, forgiveness and repentance every day like hair conditioner with every shower and a thorough job with a good stiff job is definitely the way to go.  But rat nests, even the ones made of human relationships, can be faced, and by the grace of God they can often be untangled.