Safety Razor and Humility

It snowed a bit overnight on Sunday night and the snow honestly cheered me up. If it is going to be so cold, there might as well be a quiet blanket of snow. The weatherman was predicting snow for several days that never happened, and is predicting snow today, except the sun is out with not a cloud in the sky. Being a weatherman in Idaho is a tough job.

My brother Dave sent me a check for Christmas and with it I bought that safety razor I've been wanting for more than a year. You remember safety razors? The razor that opens like a butterfly and you put the double-edged blade in? I figured since I was using a gift check, I could break my "no shopping in January" vow. I had to order it on-line, since they do not sell these in stores anymore.

When I went through the lesson of having no credit and having to pay cash for everything and not having much cash, I noticed how expensive replacement blades are for razors now. 8 blades for $15!? Besides being expensive, and despite now having 3 or 4 or even 5 blades-in-one, these do not seem to work as well or last as long as they used to. When did this change? I guess the new kind of razor is called a cartridge razor and they are now a rip-off. I thought this might be due to some safety regulation, except I did not have any trouble ordering a safety razor, so now I figure it is a corporate profit thing. (Why let people buy 10 blades for $5 when they can convince them to buy 8 for $15?) So now I have a razor that will last forever, 10 replacement blades for $5, and hey, I'm being "green" and throwing less away. (For the record, the razor was made in India and the blades in Japan.) It is going to take a while to get used to the safety razor, though. I got used to not being very careful with cartridge and disposable razors, since they are so dull, but these are sharp!

I heard recently that cats can make up to 30 different sounds and I think little Spit makes all of them. I've never heard a cat make so many different noises, from a squeaky purr to chirping to big sighs, but it used to be just Cruiser that made the whole-hearted, lowd, whiny howl. That is until this week. This week Spit decided that if she does not have her brushing by 6 pm she will wander around downstairs howling as if in a panic with brief looks at me as if the world is coming to an end. Yesterday I was finishing a job application when she started. Once I finished the application and sat down to brush her, it only took a few minutes of brushing to calm her down and then she was purring and laying across my lap and content. I'm hoping this is a "I am super bored with Winter" phase.

I thought that I was approaching this new round of job applications with some humility, until someone brought it up yesterday. I think that it is impossible to talk about humility without sounding less than humble, but I thought about the idea of doing the footwork and staying out of the results that I've heard so much. To me, that means always doing your best and then letting God, or the universe or whatever you believe in, take care of the results. Always doing the best that you can at the time prevents regret (or a resentment against yourself) and keeps you from trying to control results that you really have no control over. It keeps me in self-esteem and out of pride. With this next round of job applications I was really feeling like I should not have to do the footwork, I've done enough already!

Mahatma Gandhi associates Humility with Truth,

What is truth? A difficult question, but I have solved it for myself, by saying that it is what the voice within tells you.

All that I can, in true humility, present to you is that Truth is not to be found by anybody, who has not got an abundant sense of humility. If you would swim on the bosom of the ocean of Truth, you must reduce yourself to a zero.

Truth is within ourselves. There is an inmost centre in us all, where Truth abides in fullness. Every wrong-doer knows within himself that he is doing wrong for untruth cannot be mistaken for Truth. The law of Truth is merely understood to mean that we must speak the truth. But we understand the word in much wider sense. There should be Truth in thought, Truth in speech, and Truth in action.

[From the book, "Light of India or Message of Mahatmaji" by M. S. Deshpande.]

Today I am continuing with job applications, with a break for someone's 90th birthday cake and the Idaho Watercolor Society's welcome dinner, with a more humble attitude. My friend that went back to Bellingham, Washington worked for a guy here in Boise, who has more work this month. I called him and he is back in town on Thursday, so hopefully we can meet later this week. Tomorrow I am letting myself paint.