In A Mood To Experiment

Experimentation is an awesome thing. I'm not talking about huge things like going on a bungee-jumping adventure or something wild like that. I'm talking about simple everyday things, mundane things, things that you would never think twice about in the normal course of life, things that don't count way up there on the Bucket List or anything. Simple experiments with how you live and what you do in your daily life. They enrich life, spice things up a little, are fun to do, and often end up with rather positive results.

One experiment I did recently was chop off my own hair, rather than go to a hairdresser. Now I confess, I'm no professional. I did a rather bad job of it. I used a pair of scissors which has become a little blunt through years of use (in cutting paper at that). I cut the entire thing very unevenly (it's turned out shorter on one side that on the other, and quite a few locks of hair that should've been cut were left untouched). I cut it shorter than I intended to. And yet, with all that, it's not a huge disaster that I absolutely cannot deal with. Lucky for me, my hair curl and wave a lot, so that covers up the uneven length. Because of the way I cut it, I ended up changing my style entirely, and guess what, the new style is pretty flexible and suits me too. And regular shampooing and conditioning ensures that they stay manageable. I probably couldn't go to a formal party looking like this, but nobody in my daily life seemed to feel there was anything wrong with it, which is a lot more than I ask for.

Another experiment, which effectively occurs twice a week, is my cooking. I have no training of any kind there either, whether by a professional expert, or by an amateur one (by which I mean my mom). Every time I enter the kitchen to cook is a time for a new experiment, a new random choice of vegetables, spices and cooking time. Well, not completely random either, I do try to make things conform to what has been approved already by the experts. But my lack of expertise means it won't always turn out that way, and often there are no preapproved guidelines to follow. So it's effectively an experiment, and quite often, if I don't worry unnecessarily about the results, it turns out pretty decent.

A third, more general experiment, is walking about and negotiating stuff alone. A slightly risky experiment to make, I admit, but this falls more into the realm of exploring. The fact that each human being needs to seek their own way and learn to negotiate the world on their own anyway doesn't make it any less of an experiment. An experiment seems to indicate some sense of underlying choice for most people, the choice of whether to do the experiment or not, in which case, negotiating the world is not an experiment, because you don't have a choice there. I disagree, because an experiment is anything where something new is attempted to gain a result, and you don't have to know that result. You only have to find it. Doing it with someone always makes it easier, simply because you have two thinking minds, so you can have two varying opinions, and some amount of cross critical thinking can get you far ahead. Doing it alone is slightly more of a challenge, because you have to pose questions to yourself and answer them yourself as well. But that makes the challenge only more challenging, doesn't it?

I'm in a mood to experiment. I have been for the past few years in fact, perhaps a little passively, perhaps only in erratically timed spurts. The mood feels good, and a little more active right now. I'm happy.